CHAPTER FOUR

Indifference Engine

I

Rosenkrantz had been told to expect heavy resistance on her first storm-trooper sortie and thought it prudent to exchange Vertigo’s long range auxiliary fuel tanks for rocket pods. She left it to Chief Nauls to oversee the refit and light a fire under the cogboys and servitors, Rosenkrantz being in no doubt that the Redemption Corps’ dispersal would be swift and impulsive. The mechanics of the operation were already proving a real culture shock for the flight lieutenant.

Gone were the endless deliberations and slow preparations she’d been used to with the Volscian High Command, the Shadow Brigade being masters of strategic planning and clockwork execution. The common hiver was a rabid hound in the slips, but his spire-born superior was a methodical tactician. The Redemption Corps way of working was much more fluid: organic even. There were no sergeants barking threats of raw encouragement to their men; no squads double-timing it around the hangar with armour and weapons. Since the mutiny the corpsmen always had their armour and weapons and they were always primed and loaded. They sat around, smoking and joking, each man knew his part and he didn’t feel the need to shout about it. There would be enough of that down in the field.

The mission briefing wasn’t much different. The request for Rosenkrantz’s presence alone had been a surprise. Mortensen’s flag had been attached to an old Ryza-pattern Valkyrie, but the mission necessitated the transport of vehicles as well as troops and Rosenkrantz was the most senior Spectre commander.

The major had given Rosenkrantz and her bird the once over, only really showing any interest in her crew’s impressive number of confirmed kills and the fact that they were Jopall Indentured. This seemed to reassure him and he in turn assured Rosenkrantz that she’d get plenty of opportunity to work off her debts flying with Mortensen and his men. The only other thing that seemed to catch his attention was Rosenkrantz’s callsign, stencilled across her flight helmet: ‘Boltmagnet’. The irony seemed to amuse the major and Rosenkrantz didn’t have the heart to tell him that her number of emergency landings almost rivalled her confirmed kill ratio, and that the Vertigo wasn’t actually the Vertigo but the Vertigo VII. If he’d asked her she would simply have told him what she told everyone else: that she crashed better than anyone else she knew. At any rate, the major transferred his flag to the assault carrier and summoned Rosenkrantz to the mission briefing.

The pilot had expected to go to one of Deliverance’s tactical suites. Instead the briefing took place on the flight deck in a small amphitheatre built out of ammo crates and fuel drums. One entire side of it was a Salamander Scout vehicle decorated with soldiers. It was kind of cosy and informal and Rosenkrantz imagined that this was the way all Redemption Corps business was carried out.

The hub of activity was focused on a makeshift table in the centre, awash with pictograms and data-slates. A young, intense-looking adjutant was trying his best to get a battered hololithic display operational, much to the chagrin of a master sergeant and a hideous medical officer. Corpsmen lay sprawled across the crates, cleaning weapons, exchanging jokes and insults, waiting for the briefing to begin.

In contrast, Magister Militum Eugene Trepkos of the skitarii tech-guard stood tall and rigidly to attention like some kind of statue, although it looked to Rosenkrantz like it would be difficult for him to do anything else. His bulbous head, which was knotted with muscular concentration, sat amid a slender metallic torso and two intricate mechanical arms. Like the mechanised mandibles of some robotic crustacean, the specialised tips of his fingers twitched across the torso, feverishly at work on some incessant programme of maintenance and repair. A vermillion hood and cloak swathed his oddly impressive body, revealing little of the bottom half, bar the toes of his officer’s boots.

The ever-cheerful Captain Rask was introducing Cadet-Commissar Krieg to the major. The meeting was a cool, distrustful affair, each man’s eyes unfriendly and deep with civil hostility. As hands were offered, Rosenkrantz clocked Mortensen twist the commissar’s palm slightly in his own to get a better look at the heavy ring Krieg was wearing. In turn the cadet took in the ragged stitching of fresh gashes across the major’s arms and shoulders. As the major flicked his eyes back up at Krieg, Rosenkrantz detected the slightest nod from the young commissar. Mortensen’s lip curled into a dangerous smile and he slowly returned the gesture. The flight lieutenant felt like she’d just witnessed something significant pass between the two men, but couldn’t bring herself to believe that it was anything good. Captain Rask hobbled past, smiling, of course, and settled himself on a crate next to Rosenkrantz, working circulation into his busted knee with his tough fingertips.

A ragged cheer swept the pit as Mortensen’s harassed adjutant brought the hololith to life and decorated the space above the table with a three-dimensional representation of the fabricator moon of Illium. The small planet was one of the shepherd moons keeping Spetzghast’s pole-to pole-ring system of dust, rock and ice in good order. Jagged holographic asteroids span across the display and past the Adeptus Mechanicus world, casting ugly shadows across the sickly factoryscape that plastered every available metre of space on the moon’s surface.

‘Right, lads. This swillhole is Illium,’ Mortensen addressed the crowd of malingering officers and storm-troopers. He caught himself, bobbing his head contritely at Magister Militum Trepkos. ‘Of course, no offence intended to you, sir.’

Trepkos nodded, his face a paralytic mask. It was well known that the skitarii underwent all manner of psychosurgical procedures to remove even the smallest traces of emotion and personality. Mortensen went back to work.

‘Adeptus Mechanicus fabricator moon: culture mills and cybernetic workshops in the main, specialising in biological technologies. So that means built up areas and close quarters; limited fields of view and high concentrations of non-combatants crowding an already tight extraction zone. It isn’t pretty – but then it rarely is. Sass.’

The adjutant recalibrated the hololith, zooming in on the black, baroque nightmare of the planet’s capital. The Gothic metropolis sprawled across the fabricator moon’s equatorial bulge and thrust skyward above the endless sea of greasestacks and cooling towers.

‘Corpora Mons is the religious district and the moon’s administrative capital,’ Sass continued, relating the sum total of the gathered reports and intelligence from his freakishly photographic memory. ‘There is open rebellion across many of the districts, major areas of civil unrest being centred on military and municipal targets. Mechanicus shrines have been desecrated and a significant section of the menial workforce has taken to the streets. The workers have used their knowledge of the infrastructure to sabotage communications and transport networks. Fires are widespread and large mobs of seditionists have converged on the capital.’

‘What do these mungers actually want?’ Minghella slipped in casually, as though he were actually interested.

‘It’s a straightforward rebellion, in all probability,’ the adjutant said honestly. ‘Although no figurehead or rebel organisation has been identified and no actual demands have been made.’

‘Then how can you know that?’ Krieg challenged.

‘Sass knows a lot of things,’ Mortensen intercepted.

Krieg fixed the adjutant with a withering stare and continued unfazed: ‘What if you’re wrong? What if it’s some kind of cult influence, Chaotics or wychbreeds simply intent on mass destruction?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sass retracted with new-found caution. He wasn’t used to people questioning his strategic diagnosis. ‘But I do know that they have taken out key tactical targets: the kind of targets that unchecked would make any kind of successful coup untenable.’ Sass stabbed his finger into the holographic image of the city. ‘A quarto-legio of Imperial Titans on loan from the Legio Invictus were being housed in a massive complex to the east of Corpora Mons. The Adeptus Biologus on Illium are famed for their refinement of Titan crew mind link technologies. These technologies have been sabotaged on all but two of the god-machines. They knew exactly where to hit them. They knew that the Mechanicus Titans would crush this rebellion. This isn’t bloodlust or corruption. It’s too cold, too audacious.’

‘Cultists, freedom fighters, mechheads…’ Conklin blustered, ‘what does it matter? They all die the same way.’

‘He’s right,’ Mortensen confirmed, hating to agree with the sergeant. He indicated his intention to move on. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters if you’re waging war on an unknown enemy,’ Krieg protested, his voice carrying. ‘You have no idea of their capabilities. How can you prepare to counter them? Your approach is informed by everything you know, or more importantly, don’t know about the enemy.’

Mortensen gave the cadet-commissar the slits of his eyes. ‘We’re not waging war on them: we’ll leave that to the 364th Volscian Shadow Brigade. We’re going to be in and out before the “enemy” knows we were even there. Anything else, quite frankly, doesn’t concern us. All I really need to know is if one of these scummers puts themselves between me and an exit, are they going to drop when I put a bolt through them?’

‘And you don’t even know that…’

‘The Shadow Brigade started landing troops yesterday,’ Sass offered helpfully, ‘and are making predictably slow and steady progress up through the slum sectors, taking it hab by hab. Everything by the book: but not fast enough to recover the assets.’

‘We get on the ground and if it turns into a grox heap, we’ll improvise: it’s the Redemption Corps way,’ Mortensen told Krieg. ‘Live with it.’

Rosenkrantz watched the cadet-commissar’s lip wrinkle before he got a hold over himself. Perhaps it was Krieg’s inexperience, the recent events of the mutiny or something else entirely but the flight lieutenant had seen commissars have Guardsmen shot for less.

‘What’s the mission?’ Krieg asked, his eyes burrowing into the back of the major’s shaven skull.

‘And where?’ Rosenkrantz ventured, the mission location being of most relevance to her and the Vertigo’s crew.

Magister Militum Trepkos stepped forward with a stiff swish of scarlet. A series of ghostly lights flickered across the chrome of his trunk, activating the focal controls on the hololith and bringing the crackling image to full resolution on a gargantuan structure at the heart of Corpora Mons. His voice – a hollow mechanical echo – was everywhere at once and didn’t come from his mouth, which remained tightly shut.

‘This is the Artellus Cathedra: the centre of worship for the Cult Mechanicus on Illium. It contains the largest shrine to the glorious Omnissiah on the planet, in addition to a quad of orbital defence lasers, one housed in each steeple. The tactical as well as spiritual significance of Artellus necessitates an honour guard of two hundred skitarii troops and the Warlord Titan Mortis Maximus, outside the giant adamantium doors of the cathedra.

‘As of sixteen hours ago, all contact with both cathedra and Titan has been lost. The skitarii garrison has orders to hold the cathedra for as long as possible under such circumstances. Final communications confirmed that the Mortis Maximus has no motive power or weapons control. Understandably the Fabricator General is concerned about the Maximus’s current status, but the crew in themselves are a valuable resource and could be transferred to another god-machine if the circumstances allowed. He wants the assets back: in one piece.’

‘How the hell do a bunch of trigger-happy menials take out a Titan?’ Krieg shot across the pit with unmasked disbelief.

‘Lucky shot?’ the major asked with mock sincerity.

‘Have you even read the reconnaissance files?’

‘There are reconnaissance files?’ Mortensen blurted back, his voice thick with meaty derision.

‘Perhaps the war machine was critically damaged at the installation, with the other Titans,’ Sass offered, hoping his hypothesis would throw a little cold water on the increasingly incensed Mortensen and Krieg.

‘Or perhaps we’ve got some Alpha-level psyker running around down there,’ the commissar hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Or worse.’

‘You’re clearly new to this, so I’m going to make it real easy for you,’ Mortensen rumbled caustically. ‘If there was any evidence of corruption or the influence of the Ruinous Powers, the Volscians would have reported it by now. Believe me. These guys don’t wipe their backsides without filing a reconnaissance report.’

‘Better than wiping your backside on the recon report, which seems to be Redemption Corps standard practice.’

‘Look, cadet-commissar,’ Mortensen seethed, ‘if you feel this mission is beyond your particular talents, whatever they are, please feel free to stand aside and let us do our duty.’

‘I’d hardly be doing my duty if I did that,’ the commissar shot back.

‘Well, this is what we do Krieg, so you’d better get used to it. Your alarmist threat assessments aren’t wanted or needed.’

The cadet-commissar’s voice became cold and certain. ‘Don’t do that,’ Krieg warned him with brutal sincerely. ‘Don’t question my courage. Your own infamous variety of bravado isn’t worth spit if it does nothing to serve the Emperor’s cause. You won’t find me sending your men into the embrace of thoughtless slaughter. Mind that you do the same, major.’

Rosenkrantz had watched these two men publicly goad one another for the past few minutes, but when the flashpoint came, even she was taken off guard. The major’s men were barely out of their seats and only a handful of corpsmen had managed to bring the greased barrels of their weapons to bear. Trepkos, of course, did nothing, despite having the only reflexes in the hanger swift enough to intercede. By then the two men had clashed in the centre of the amphitheatre. A dazzled Sass had been rammed aside and the hololith toppled, crashing to the metal floor. The gathered soldiers froze and Rosenkrantz with them.

The razor edge of the major’s storm blade trembled against the flesh of the commissar’s throat, each minute tremor nicking tiny slices across his oesophagus; the muzzle of Krieg’s hellpistol hovered between the major’s eyes, humming its supercharged intention to spread his brains across the flight deck. Each man had got a free hand to the other’s wrist in a messy, makeshift hold and the two soldiers snarled at one another across the hate-charged space that separated their contorted faces.

Rosenkrantz flicked her eyes around the amphitheatre. No storm-trooper would move to stop them now. This wasn’t shock or surprise anymore: shoulders and weapons had since sagged. It was respect. Honour. No corpsman would deny his commanding officer the opportunity to kill the commissar himself. The pilot could almost feel the soldiers willing it on.

Either way, Rosenkrantz sensed that she was about to witness a murder. Something gave inside her. She felt herself take a step forward, but became suddenly aware of Rask’s bony fingers closing on her arm like a vice. She turned. He gave her an almost imperceptible shake of the head. She gave him an almost imperceptible shake of her own before breaking from his grip and striding across to the wrangling spectacle of the two men in the centre of the amphitheatre. They barely seemed aware of her presence.

‘There is a saying on Jopall: “To Evil everything when good men do nothing”,’ the flight lieutenant cited softly. She slipped her slender hands slowly between the men, resting her fingers on the safety stud of the hellpistol and the clipped tip of Mortensen’s survival knife. Pushing gently at both, the blade came away from Krieg’s raw neck and the stud slid finally to safe. ‘My bird is prepped and ready to fly. What’ll she be carrying? Corpsmen or corpses?’ she put to them.

The grip relaxed and the major and commissar untangled themselves. Krieg took a measured look around the amphitheatre to make sure the barrels were down before holstering his hellpistol. Mortensen turned and buried the storm blade in the table before helping Sass to his feet and righting the toppled hololith. Krieg straightened the lapels of his greatcoat. Mortensen stretched his brawny neck and faced the Redemption Corpsmen once more.

‘Okay, just like Abraxus V. The extraction zone is too tight for a landing,’ Mortensen continued stolidly. ‘I will take the Redemption Corps and make an airborne deployment above the zone: a high altitude insertion directly onto the top of the Titan. Magister Militum Trepkos has agreed to accompany the insertion. He has the Mechanicus runecodes for the bridge top hatch. That should save some time.

‘Second Platoon from the 364th Volscian Shadow Brigade will rappel to the surrounding roofs from the Valkyries – establish and hold a four-point ground extraction zone around the Titan’s feet. Captain Rask will coordinate the deployment from the air.’

‘What about the Reapers? Airstrikes prior to insertion would certainly soften things up a bit on the ground,’ Minghella advocated.

Rosenkrantz nodded. She was all for Wing Commander Wharmby’s Reaper Wing to blaze them a path up to the extraction. A fly-by from Deliverance’s Tactical Reconaissance Group had already given Brigadier Voskov valuable information on the situation at ground level. Why not have Wharmby’s fighter squadron do a preliminary run? His strike fighters, Bolts and Marauders would only be sitting on the flight deck.

‘Absolutely out of the question,’ Trepkos cut in, the stainless steel timbre of his voice echoing around the amphitheatre. ‘The Fabricator General would never sanction a bomber attack by the Aeronautica. The collateral damage to the faith district would be incalculable. What if Artellus or the Mortis Maximus were hit? It’s one thing for the enemy to indulge in wanton destruction. You’ll have to do what you can with your gunships and transports.’

A ripple of discontent and profanity swept the audience but Mortensen silenced the disgruntled corpsmen with a hand. ‘A convoy of fire support Centaurs carrying Fourth Platoon in small groups under Lieutenant Deleval will deploy from a secure landing zone nearby and make their way to the extraction point.’

‘How do you know the landing zone is secure?’ Krieg threw in.

‘The Legio’s only other operational Titan – a Warhound Scout called Ferrus Lupus – is handling that for us, as we speak,’ Sass declared with confidence.

‘Cadet-Commissar Krieg will accompany the convoy,’ Mortensen continued. ‘Just in case they run into something they can’t handle. By the time they arrive I should have the assets out, on the ground and ready for evacuation. All squads will then collapse back to the convoy. The column will punch its way back to the secured landing zone. The Spectres will then lift us back to Deliverance. Mission time, deployment to extraction – three hours. Like the lady said, let’s make good on this. To your stations.’

Corpsmen around the amphitheatre evaporated. Mortensen’s strident form cut a swathe through the exiting troopers, flanked by Minghella and the bruiser master sergeant. Rask hobbled to catch up, with Sass clutching the battered hololith and bringing up the rear. Before she knew it, Rosenkrantz was alone with Krieg.

‘I want to thank you,’ he said plainly, breaking the blanket of silence that had descended on the amphitheatre. ‘A light touch was needed there.’ She nodded slowly. ‘But please, I must warn you. Don’t interfere with Commissariat business again.’

With that, the cadet-commissar left.

‘You’re welcome,’ the pilot called after him before setting off also, for a place that made marginally more sense to her: the cockpit of the Vertigo.

II

Like some cosmic gliding behemoth, Sigma Scorpii extended tendrils of rusty light across Illium’s asteroid-dominated sky. As the shadows began to recede across the fabricator moon, Flight Lieutenant Dekita Rosenkrantz rolled the Vertigo to port to avoid yet another belching smoke stack. Swooping in like angels of the armageddon, the procession of Spectre Valkyrie-variants had dropped out of the sky above the sea of Adeptus Mechanicus surgical sweatshops and cybernetics mills, flanked by a cortege of Valkyries and lean Vulture gunships.

Lieutenant Commander Waldemar had been more daring than Rosenkrantz would have imagined, bringing his precious Deliverance down below the thin upper cloud layers and shaving precious minutes off their descent. As soon as Waldemar had delivered his payload, the Navy carrier vanished though, probably not too comfortable above Mechanicus defence lasers and missile silos.

Ordinarily, Illium’s immigrant workforce would just be stirring in their bunks by now, but today was not an ordinary day. The citizens of the fabricator moon were already out in force and had been most of the night, lighting up the streets and dusty plazas with the flash of lasguns and pipe bombs.

As Vertigo led the formation across the skies of the greasy industriascape, Rosenkrantz’s keen eyes were drawn to an irregular arrangement of fat, rusted chimneys and smog stacks. The cluster of mill vents belched thick, black smoke, but none of it was coming from the chimneys.

‘No, no, no, no, no,’ the pilot muttered to herself as the Spectre closed on the area. The configuration of chimneys was irregular because of their angle: it was the feature that had attracted her attention in the first place. The vast majority of the vents struck for the sky, vertically upwards; but these seemed at all angles, criss-crossing one another like fallen trees in a forest battered by a storm. Some were leaning or prone but largely intact; others had been demolished and smashed and lay broken-backed and shattered across the devastated district.

Rosenkrantz hit the vox-stud for the troop bay.

‘Major, you’re going to want to see this – forward portside.’

The pilot heard the storm-trooper grunt and direct one of his men to roll aside one of the Spectre’s side doors. The gushing wind howled down the vox, drowning out a stream of the major’s bitter oaths and curses as he saw what she saw.

Back at the vox Mortensen barked at the flight lieutenant: ‘Have our formation hold and circle at this altitude. Inform them we are going in.’

‘Benedict – handle that, please,’ Rosenkrantz instructed, before dive-rolling the Spectre down towards the spectacle. As their angle of approach changed, more of the destruction was revealed. Instead of the stack tops the black smoke was pouring from the base of the chimneys where a coordinated set of explosions had levelled the district. At the centre of the fallen giants lay another giant: the Ferrus Lupus. The Mars-Pattern Warhound must have been making its behemothic approach to secure the landing zone when it stomped into the only trap bigger than itself.

The synchronised demolitions had to be the work of Mechanicus insurgents and their execution held a sad beauty. Gargantuan chimneys and smoke stacks had toppled and smashed against the Titan’s mighty body, knocking it off-balance and over onto its armoured back. There the grand Titan struggled to right itself, its Vulcan mega bolter and plasma blastgun pointing uselessly at the sky as chimney after chimney tumbled over it, pinning it down and dashing its gleaming hull with brick and girder.

Out of the rat warren of wreckage the tech heretics crawled, shooting at the clouds in pride and jubilation with several groups firing on the Titan’s impervious superstructure with cheap, single-shot rocket tubes. The Warhound’s huge, leering muzzle flashed with optimistic blasts as the rockets flashed off the war machine’s cockpit.

‘Flight lieutenant.’ It was Mortensen on the vox again. ‘We’re going to make an unscheduled stop. Prepare for disembarkation.’

She’d been afraid of that; but in reality, Magister Militum Trepkos was probably giving the major little in the way of choice. Their mission parameters had just been expanded.

‘Affirmative.’ Dropping the Spectre in over the Warhound’s fallen form, Rosenkrantz span the aircraft down into a fast-moving descent. This was as much to give the Chief and his door gunners a free-rolling arc of fire as not to offer the Mechanicus rebels an easy target.

The four side doors of the carrier must have been thrown open because Rosenkrantz could hear the pneumatic thunder of Vertigo’s heavy bolters cutting up the Titan’s tormenters and driving them back under the rubble from beneath which they’d crawled. Holding the carrier still above the Ferrus Lupus’s brazen chest the flight lieutenant waited with her heart in her mouth as Vertigo hovered like a bombastic dare to the rocket-armed seditionists.

Below, Mortensen and his storm-troopers would be no less vulnerable to small arms fire as they rappelled the distance between the Spectre and the Titan’s chest.

‘They’re on the ground,’ Captain Rask voxed up what seemed like an age later and Rosenkrantz banked the aircraft into a turn, once again opening up the arc of cover fire for her gunners and rolling gently into standard evasive manoeuvres around the drop zone.

This gave the pilot a better view of Mortensen and his recovery team. The major had selected only three other corpsmen, besides himself, who were advancing rapidly up the Titan’s chest and collar plates in full carapace and packs. The storm-troopers advanced one after another in sequence, ducking under the barrels of each other’s chunky hellguns, securing the path with conservative blasts of supercharged repression fire.

Las-fire lanced back, enthusiastic but undisciplined, as the tech heretics attempted to secure their prize from the safety of the shadows, hidden in caves of rubble and broken chimneys where the hammering of Vertigo’s heavy bolters failed to acquire them.

The Redemption Corps major strode across the Warhound’s hull with supreme confidence. Helmetless and with hellgun slung, he pounded across the metal between his killers, feral and unreasoning. The Titan was his now and, like a jealous carnivore happening upon a fresh kill, he was intent upon running off the scavengers.

Trepkos followed his proud skitarii, hood and cloak flowing after like a vermillion advertisement. His movements were no less determined but mimicked more the stomp of one of his Titan war machines than the stalking, animal gait of the major.

Bounding up the cliff-face of the Warhound’s throat, Mortensen attacked the climb with fervour, pulling himself up, arm over arm through the hydraulics and ricochets. As Trepkos went to work on mechanisms under the chin of the Ferrus Lupus’s great armoured muzzle and the prayers required to operate them, the major and his men positioned themselves about the cockpit section, weapons ready.

Rosenkrantz circled as the Mechanicus revolutionaries were drawn from their hiding places. Vertigo itself was now being repeatedly targeted, with several hopeful rockets streaming wide and a multitude of luckier las-blasts scuffing the hull and canopy. The storm-trooper’s surgical insertion and bold advance had initially taken the rebels by surprise but now their territorial desperation was showing with individuals and small groups rapidly closing on the Titan cockpit from across the wrecked landscape.

With a deep, reverberating thud and a flash the cockpit awning mechanism fired and rolled, carried back by gravity and its great armoured weight. As the smoke cleared, the cramped conditions inside the Warhound were revealed with two stunned moderati and the stricken Titan princeps strapped into the confined space.

The Redemption Corps major had little time for ceremony and grabbed one of the moderati by his hard-wire lines and cables, traumatically tearing him from both his link with the downed Titan and his seat. A rocket from an advancing heretic, kneeling in a ladder cage that ran up the side of a nearby tumbled smoke stack, flashed before Mortensen’s face. Before the projectile had time to strike the side of the opposing factory wall, the storm-trooper had his chunky autopistol clear of its holster. With a roar the major unleashed the weapon on his attacker, raining a light show of deflections off the bars and rungs of the ladder cage before finding his mark and riddling the trapped tech-heretic with explosive fire.

Hoisting the protesting moderati onto the shoulder of a nearby corpsman, Mortensen repeated the procedure with the princeps and his other crewman and sent them off towards the leaning smoke stack. Offering Trepkos a meaty hand, the major pulled the skitarii officer up the forward cockpit and directed him after the storm-troopers.

Mortensen’s men had reached the fallen chimney, which lay at a forty-five degree angle across the Titan’s plasma blastgun and several other demolished towers. With their recovered targets bundled over shoulder and pack, the storm-troopers stomped up the outside of the ladder cage, towards the chimney’s punishing summit. With furious las-fire following them up the incline from pursuing seditionists, Trepkos and Mortensen followed.

Gliding up behind the escaping corpsmen, Rosenkrantz directed her door gunners to drive the Mechanicus menials back from the base of the smoke stack with a storm of concentrated fire, allowing Mortensen and his men time to get a little bit of distance on their pursuers. Proceeding on up the length of the stack, the flight lieutenant held Vertigo at the relative safety of the chimney top as the storm-troopers endurance-climbed their way towards them.

Las-blasts struck wildly at the chimney, several glancing off the Redemption Corps’ thick, armaplas carapace and one burning into the back of the Ferrus Lupus’s howling princeps. A rocket was more fortunate, launched from a factory window and burying itself in the base of the smoke stack. The entire structure bucked and a visible shiver ran up the metalwork, almost shaking the storm-troopers loose. Dropping to the mesh of the ladder cage and grabbing on, the corpsmen held and waited as the superstructure groaned and twisted inside.

Suddenly Mortensen was very animated, waving his arms and pushing his troopers on. Picking up the pace, as well as the extra weight, the armoured figures darted up the remaining length of the chimney and passed their loads in through Vertigo’s side doors. The vox chirped.

‘They’re in,’ Captain Rask reported.

Throwing back the stick Rosenkrantz blasted skyward, away from the toppled Titan and the industrial forest of fallen smog stacks that buried it. Back at the head of the waiting formation of Navy aircraft, the pilot banked towards the hub districts of Corpora Mons. Soon the sulphur towers, ventscrapers and the endless landscape of wretched slave mills gave way to the baroque lines and Gothic majesty of the faith district’s tabernacles and cathedrals.

‘Approaching first drop zone, flight lieutenant,’ Benedict notified her.

‘Is he always like this?’ the major called, chomping down on a fat, stubby cigar. Rosenkrantz flashed him her eyes before returning her attention to the business of flying the aircraft through the narrower chasms of the new district.

The major pulled himself up the companionway ladder and slapped the servitor co-pilot on his cold, pallid shoulders. ‘Lighten up, Navy boy. It’s the start of a brand new, action-packed day.’

It was obvious that the storm-trooper was in his element from the cocksure grin and the veritable stink of adrenaline and testosterone in the cockpit. He came in beside Rosenkrantz to get a better look at the ground and snatched a headset from a canopy rack.

‘Drop zone is hot,’ reported Benedict as they banked into the space above an open plaza, ‘I repeat, the dropzone is hot.’

Mortensen leaned in closer. ‘Not for long,’ he grumbled with concentration.

Rosenkrantz peered over the nose cone at their designated landing zone, the one Mortensen had boldly claimed could be made secure. On every other day of the year it was a large ornamental esplanade and cactus flower garden preceding the entrance to an Omnissiah mechshrine. Today it was the sight of unprecedented slaughter. Black smoke was pouring from the shrine and the garden’s bloated ornamental cacti had been riddled with las-fire. Seditionists pelted the hallowed building with debris and bolts from their rifles. Ragged, beaten tech-priests were running for their lives down the length of the esplanade, pursued by posses of rebels wielding blood-splattered wrenches and lengths of noose fashioned from power cable. With the invaluable assistance of the Ferrus Lupus, this would have been nothing more than a plasma-bathed ghost town. There was little point in dwelling on that now, however, any more than worrying how Deleval’s convoy would make it through to the cathedra without the firepower of the Warhound to clear the way.

‘Blazer One, this is…’ Mortensen stalled. ‘What the hell is this bird called?’

‘Vertigo,’ Rosenkrantz enlightened him.

‘Blazer One, this is Vertigo. We have some hostiles crowding the dropzone. Would you be so good as to strafe those malingering sons-of-bitches and clear the way, so to speak?’

Rosenkrantz watched as six Vulture gunships broke off from the main pack and streaked off in search of slaughter. Taking turns on rotational passes, the gunships tore through the esplanade peppering the murderous mobs with their multilasers.

‘Yeah, get that maggot in the hood,’ Mortensen buzzed. Rosenkrantz marvelled at the man. It was like he was watching a game of razorball. ‘No, the other one. And watch the cloisters; I thought I saw some mechhead with a rocket…’

The sudden crack of a missile fire was instantly followed by a thunderous flash as Blazer Two took a rocket in the tail. Spewing smoke, the Vulture descended in a heavy spin, throwing its shattered tail section all around the plaza.

‘We have a confirmed hit on Blazer Two,’ Benedict reported helpfully.

‘Yeah,’ the major growled, his good mood evaporating fast. ‘Thanks for the update.’

Rosenkrantz watched Blazer Two slam into the ground at the foot of the mechshrine steps. Her wings were alight and her hull shattered, but as far as the pilot could tell, her cockpit section was intact.

‘Blazer Two, this is Vertigo,’ Rosenkrantz announced. ‘Report casualties and status. Please respond.’ The vox gave a deathly crackle for a moment, before Blazer Two’s pilot called in.

‘Rig’s totalled. I think we might be on fire. I’m okay. Jesperson’s taken some flak in the back.’

Pushing the microphone of his vox-set to his lips, Mortensen spat, ‘Vector One and Two, move in and offer cover fire. And don’t get clipped. Blazer One, would it be too much to ask to bag that munger?’

The Vectors, the detachment’s four Valkyrie assault carriers, plunged into the maelstrom below, the heavy bolter door gunners giving a good account of themselves.

The major proceeded to grumble orders down the vox as Blazer One and Three continued their strafing runs on the cloisters, their multilasers reducing the esplanade’s architecture to a pit-cratered mess. Despite the joint efforts of the Valkyrie gunners, a small horde of ragged seditionists closed on the downed Vulture, hacking at the cracked canopy with lump hammers and track irons.

‘Nash, get out of there!’ Rosenkrantz bellowed down the vox. The pilot had his Navy issue pistol out and was trying to scatter the mob, but it was thankfully just as difficult blasting out of the canopy as smashing in.

‘Can’t… move… Jesperson.’

Vector One’s shadow suddenly passed over the gang and a hail of bolter fire tore several of the rebels off the aircraft and deposited them in a bloody heap on the plaza floor. Not before a scrawny runt of a seditionist slotted a grenade through the small opening the lump hammer had caved in the canopy armaplas, however. There were assorted wails of desperation from the vox before the inside of the cockpit lit up with the momentary blast of a frag firestorm.

‘Vrekkin’ animals!’ Mortensen roared, ripping the vox-set from his shaven skull. ‘Put this beast down on the deck, now,’ he ordered, shimmying down the companionway ladder.

Throwing the Spectre into a nose-dive, Rosenkrantz was determined to come in high and fast, giving the rocket launcher little time to acquire the Vertigo as a target.

‘Benedict, prepare countermeasures.’

‘Affirmative, flight lieutenant.’

Rosenkrantz altered the channel on her vox: ‘Chief, we’re going in. We’ll need plenty of cover fire, the zone is still hot.’ Nauls grunted affirmation back down the vox. As crew chief he would already have his hands full. Besides managing the Vertigo’s four door gunners, he also had the cramped conditions created by the presence of two fully loaded Imperial Centaur fire support vehicles stowed in the hold to contend with; this with the extra headache of the major’s storm-troopers, strapped into their bulky grav-chutes, sitting up forward. And now, with the Spectre packed to bursting point, he also had the morose Mortensen bouncing around down there to make his life even more miserable.

With a screech of air brakes, Rosenkrantz pulled the Spectre up, just in time to avoid burying the aircraft under the esplanade. The assault carrier’s superstructure creaked in protest, but with Rosenkrantz at the stick it was used to such cavalier handling.

‘Lowering landing gear,’ the co-pilot droned.

It wasn’t long before Rosenkrantz had given the crew something to do. All four heavy bolters sang an ode to death from the top of their barrels, sweeping the plaza of carefully advancing seditionists, intent on murder and mayhem. The Spectre came to rest gently on the esplanade.

Benedict saw it first, his usual demeanour abandoned in favour of something more direct. ‘Starboard side!’

Rosenkrantz picked out their bushwhacker, resting his rocket tube against a bolt-mangled pillar, aiming straight at the Vertigo.

‘Holy Throne. Brace for impact!’ she screamed down the vox. One of the Vultures unexpectedly swept side-on between them, a constant rain of multilaser fire driving their assailant further along the cloisters.

If that wasn’t enough, Mortensen was out on the plaza, striding across the killing ground between streams of heavy bolter fire and ducking under Blazer One’s swooping hull. Rosenkrantz watched as the gunship rose out of the plaza for another run and the seditionist stepped out from behind a cloister pillar, ready once again to fire on the Vertigo with his rocket tube.

Instead he came face to face with the Redemption Corps major, who was casually injecting a fresh magazine into the grip of his chunky autopistol. The two men looked at one another, the rocket launcher useless at that range and limp in the rebel’s hands. Mortensen flicked up the pistol, blasting the rebel almost point-blank. The first round lifted the seditionist’s flailing body from the ground and flung him back against the cloister wall. Closing on the rebel, the major unleashed further fury with the weapon as he blasted away with each sure-footed step, three, four, five times, before flicking to auto and riddling the mechhead’s body with the remainder of his clip. Kneeling by the tattered corpse Mortensen emptied his weapon in the seditionist’s lap before slapping another magazine home. Holstering the weapon, he scooped up the abandoned rocket tube, with its single rocket.

A hammer-wielding maniac came at Mortensen from the left on his return to the aircraft, but one of the door gunners plucked him out of reach with a short burst of explosive firepower. Rosenkrantz heard him slap the side of the cockpit harshly.

‘Lower ramp,’ she instructed Benedict.

The Spectre gave another creak as a Centaur fire support vehicle rolled out from under the aircraft’s beak and came to a standstill by the downed Vulture’s blasted remains. A begoggled Volscian popped out of the central hatch and got to grips with the pintle-mounted assault cannon.

The Spectres and Centaurs combined gave the Redemption Corps and their Shadow Brigade compatriots just the speed and flexibility they needed for fast deployment in crowded battlezones. Chimera carriers were not only too large to be transported in the swollen hulls of the Spectre-class Valkyries, they were too wide and slow for the chaos of Illium’s narrow streets. Fire support Centaurs were super-charged for swift transportation under fire; they were also fully armour-encased, unlike their tow-tractor brethren and packed the punch of a small infantry support vehicle.

Another slap and a wave from Mortensen. ‘Benedict, close ramp. White Thunder, you are cleared to begin your descent,’ Rosenkrantz assured one of the sister Spectres.

‘He’s in,’ the chief told her curtly down the vox. Feathering the stick, Rosenkrantz took the aircraft off the deck and cleared the drop zone. It wasn’t long before Mortensen was back in the cockpit.

‘As soon as the last Spectre’s cleared, have them go straight to the airstrip. Despatch the Vectors to establish hold points. Blazer One and Three to provide cover for the fire support vehicles; all remaining Vultures to escort the carriers and secure the evacuation. Clear?’

‘As the skies, sir.’

‘It’d better be,’ Mortensen warned, ‘I’m not losing any more birds to menials who get lucky with rocket launchers.’ He tossed Benedict the rocket tube. Picking the blood-bathed weapon up with his thumb and fingertips, Benedict deposited the launcher on the ledge above his hullside codifier panel. ‘Souvenir,’ the major told him, before stepping back on the companion ladder.

‘If you have any trouble I’ll be in the hold, suiting up,’ he called to Rosenkrantz, his good mood returning within moments, the prospect of diving head first out of a perfectly good aircraft appealing to the major’s sensibilities.

The pilot pursed her lips, allowing the casual slur to hang in the air. She’d been wrong about carrying Mortensen, she mused. There would be a lot less trouble for her and her crew once the major was off her bird. And that moment couldn’t come soon enough.

III

As Vertigo’s ramp rolled open and the full glory of the Illium warzone was revealed to Mortensen, Krieg’s warnings came back to haunt him.

Corpora Mons and other periphery districts were overrun by heretics, defectors and infectious mayhem. The small-scale firefights and rioting mobs had found their way into every part of the city. The capital was turning itself inside out. The landing zone had been hotter than he’d expected, but he’d put that down to Sass and plain bad luck. Mostly Sass. From here the whole planet seemed ablaze with rebellion. Anything bearing the caducal helix of the Mechanicus or the Imperial aquila had been blown to pieces or razed to the ground. Thick smoke spewed from the urban nightmare below, the rough black lines carving up the sky like an insane tessellation. Vertigo cut through the pattern, her slipstream dispersing the stack so it appeared like the aircraft had snapped the threads of a giant spider’s web.

For once Mortensen had to sympathise with the Shadow Brigade. Even with the 364th, it could take the best part of six months to retake the moon, street by street. Each district was a labyrinthine hell of gauntlets, sniper killzones and booby traps. This maelstrom had already swallowed the Adeptus Mechanicus skitarii forces that provided security for the installations and two companies of Spetzghast Mercantile Militia, scrambled from the subsector capital. Now it was going to swallow the Redemption Corps. More accurately, Mortensen and his fellow storm-troopers had volunteered to dive head first down the monstrous rebellion’s throat.

Strapped into carapace and the chest-hugging grav chute, the major made preparations for the drop. Pulling his helmet on and slapping down the visor, he walked towards the opening ramp. The Spectre was high above the Cita-Cathedra of Artellus-Magna, the most magnificent of Illium’s many places of worship, glorifying the art and mystery of the Omnissiah and housing the Episcopal throne of the Imperator Fabricate. The cita-cathedra signified the heart of the capital, with Corpora districts segmentally radiating out from the centre: the spiritual quarters, administrative sectors, conurbation strips of Imperial tenement hab-blocks and, of course, the vast manufactorium zones of the city.

A swift rap on the side of Mortensen’s helmet brought him back to the here and now. It was Rask, pointing up towards the cockpit and donning a head-set. Sass was behind him but swiftly disappeared up the companionway ladder. The intense adjutant never did drops, having little liking for heights in general, despite being attached to an air-mobile storm troop. He usually helped coordinate operations with Rask, where his keen mind could wrangle with the big picture and weigh up alternative strategies, should the situation on the ground go tits up: which it usually did.

‘Try and draw some of their fire from us,’ Mortensen hollered, compensating for the helmet and turbulence in the bay. Rask nodded and smiled his crooked smile. ‘You know,’ the major added, ‘without actually drawing fire on yourselves.’

The captain took an awkward step towards the companionway. ‘Watch your back!’ he called from the steps.

‘That’s why I brought you,’ the major yelled back. Mortensen peered down at the roofs and towers of the cita-cathedra. Standing astride the massive adamantium doors of the building was the mighty Imperial Warlord Titan Mortis Maximus. The cathedra plaza was a rippling carpet of revolutionaries. Mobs swarmed around the Titan’s gigantic feet and hung from suicidal heights as they attempted to scale the sides of the god-machine, desperately searching for some kind of an entrance.

As the Vertigo rolled to port the major breathed in the full, awesome lethality of the metal mountain below. He wasn’t the first to stare in marvel at the destructive capabilities of the war machine; to wonder what it would be like to command such incredible power.

If he hadn’t been so stunned by the spectacle, Mortensen might have noticed that something was seriously wrong.

As it was, it was Rosenkrantz that clocked it first and broke in across the vox-channel in sickening realisation: ‘Those plasma silos are open.’

Mortensen growled.

The Spectre’s cargo bay suddenly crackled with a blinding, searing light. A momentary shockwave of heat rolled through the aircraft as a fat beam of plasma energy blasted skyward past the Vertigo.

The aircraft took a stomach-churning tumble, throwing Mortensen into the wall of the belly compartment. Rask missed his footing on the companionway and fell. He skimmed across the slick floor of the carrier, snatching wildly for a handhold. Several of the aircraft’s door gunners and the storm-troopers struck out their arms for him but their safety lines and harnesses tore them back. The major dropped and sunk his fist into the webbing of Rask’s passing flak jacket, just managing to grab the flailing captain before he slipped out of the bay door. Rask’s legs dangled off the ramp, kicking at the spinning nothing below, desperate for a foothold that wasn’t there. Clawing his way up Mortensen’s carapace dropsuit, the officer hauled himself back inside the bay door. The major brought him up to his helmet faceplate.

‘You okay?’ Mortensen bawled.

‘Vrekkin’ great: next stupid question,’ Rask howled back.

‘Status!’ the storm-trooper called into his helmet vox-link.

‘We just lost White Thunder,’ Rosenkrantz shot back. In macabre illustration Vertigo’s rolling spin revealed the Spectre as she fell past. Her belly, cockpit and tail section were intact but her starboard wing was completely gone, burned out of existence by the column of plasma firepower the cathedra had just unleashed at some target in the upper atmosphere. As Vertigo’s own tail came around again Mortensen caught another glimpse of White Thunder’s spiralling form.

‘Is Deliverance hit?’

Mortensen and Rask exchanged a grim glance as the vox crackled with static suspense.

‘Negative,’ Benedict finally cut in. ‘Deliverance is clear. Looks to Commander Waldemar like a ranging shot. He thinks that it might be prudent to–’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Mortensen barged in.

‘You’ve got to go,’ Rask called – still clutching the ramp struts as the Illian industriascape whirled by behind him. The major nodded.

‘Get all aircraft down on the deck,’ the major ordered.

‘We’re not going to last very long at street level.’

‘Longer than against those silos,’ Mortensen answered with harsh logic. Rask nodded. ‘Locate the Spectre and reroute the convoy to pick up them up. The whole city will be coming down on them.’

‘Major,’ Benedict piped up. ‘Deliverance reports the cathedra’s plasma batteries are charging for another orbital assault.’

‘We can’t be here,’ Rosenkrantz added, her words laced with alarm.

‘Okay, keep your flight suit on,’ Mortensen barked, signalling Magister Militum Trepkos and the Redemption Corps to come forward on their snaglines. Corporal Vedette presented herself, slipping a helmet down over her platinum blonde hair. Her limp was all but gone, but even if her thigh wound had been giving her hell, Vedette knew better than to show it on an operation. ‘Ready?’

‘Born ready, sir,’ she beamed back.

A Mordian by birth, Zola Vedette had long been distinguishing herself in the storm-trooper ranks, when she met Major Mortensen. She’d been part of a rearguard force left to cover the withdrawal of the Noctan Strikes from the night world of Nebrus IX. Disease had swept across the tiny planet and the cities had been overrun by plague zombies. The Redemption Corps had been brought in at the eleventh hour with the clock already running on an Ordo Sepulturum sanctioned cyclonic orbital cleansing. Mortensen’s men had snatched the Noctans and Vedette’s stalwart rearguard from the planet surface mere moments before torpedo impact. The major had Rask pull some strings the next day.

‘As you were.’

The drop troops were already filing down the ramp in their carapace armour and helmets. Like Mortensen, the storm-troopers carried their hellguns and weapons slung on their packs, in order to avoid distorting the aerodynamics of the Redemption Corps’ trademark high altitude thunderbolt descent. The hope was that the troopers would move faster than the anti-aircraft guns could track. A distinct bonus when freefalling into a shooting gallery, where a street urchin with a flintlock could cut you in half with a stray shot.

Vedette proceeded to count the storm-troopers out, barking their names in quick succession as each in turn pitched off the Spectre’s ramp with the certainty of newborn Tallarn thundervultures.

The last of the squad gave Vedette a nod of their helmets before vaulting into the maelstrom outside: Minghella, who’d been checking everyone’s oxygen; Pryce, his carapace jangling with cheap icons and relics, and then the replacements: Greco – infamous spire-breaker and Progenium runaway; Teague, the Elysian young blood; Kynt, the one-eyed comms-officer and Quant, Gorskii’s demolitions stand-in. The Valhallan storm-trooper had barely survived the 1001st’s bloody rebellion and unfortunately had lost the battle, as so many had, on the operating table. As always, Rask had been ready with suitable substitutes: troopers the major could already trust or those that Rask believed he would get to.

They were followed by Vedette, who gave an obligatory salute that was more habit than requirement before peeling off into oblivion. The major watched them tumble away from the aircraft, taking a few steps of his own before launching off the ramp.

Holding his hands behind his back, Mortensen plunged helmet first through the thermals, rapidly falling into the slipstream created by the other drop troops. Like a small meteor shower, the Redemption Corps streaked for the planet’s surface with the heavens howling around them.

Mortensen ate it up: heart racing with the desire to be part of the whole wanton abandon of it. He didn’t hunger for blood – he was no savage or berserker. He merely thrived on the cutting edge of possibility. Nobody held Zane Mortensen’s fate in their hand: what he did, his very next action, and the one after that, would determine his destiny for good or for ill. That was where he felt most at peace. Crossing the terminator of exigency, on the event horizon of the unforeseen, where he was at that very moment.

The entire city suddenly vanished as explosions tore the air to shreds around him. An oil slick of black smog swiftly blanketed the area in the wake of hundreds of enemy shells splatter-bombing the sky. Mortensen swung this way and that, making his trajectory more difficult to predict, but it was largely futile. Some insane genius inside the cathedra hadn’t been satisfied with hurling shafts of boiling plasma into the heavens and had ordered the gargoyle encrusted macro-cannons manned and armed.

As he punctured the bottom of the inkblot cloud, the major caught sight of the Vertigo, corkscrewing around their descent pattern, attempting to draw the artillery fire. The Spectre was rewarded with an alarmingly obliging spree of thunder blasts across the nose of the aircraft, forcing Rosenkrantz to roll the Navy bird sharply to starboard.

Focusing once again on the fast approaching cityscape, Mortensen noticed that one of his storm-troopers had broken formation. Certainly, each corpsman would have had to negotiate the dangers of the blanket barrage, but Pryce was careering all over, arms loose and legs flailing in the backwash. Bringing his own arms in tighter and helmet down, Mortensen surged forwards for the trooper. As he crossed to Pryce’s other side, he could see what had happened. The trooper must have caught the blast wave of one of the detonations: his left leg and arm were a ragged mess of blood and bone and the side of his helmet and visor were shattered. Unconscious or dead, he wouldn’t be able to fire his own grav-chute.

Pushing his body to the limit, Mortensen willed himself onwards, drawing closer and closer to the injured soldier, desperate to reach the vectorpull and activate his chute. At least that way, Vertigo could swing in and collect him.

As his fingertips brushed the pack’s repulsion vents, Pryce was ripped from his grasp. The air was quaking with a fresh shower of artillery explosions. Taking the full force of one of the sporadic shells, the unfortunate trooper was blasted skyward in a drizzle of gore and religious iconography, catapulting the major into a freefall spin. Little good the seals and relics had done him in the end.

For a small eternity, Illium became a vertiginous assault on Mortensen’s senses: a vomit-inducing kaleidoscope of reversals with g-forces fighting inside his body for possession of his centre of gravity. Perhaps following some previous pattern of thought, Mortensen’s fingers found the vectorpull of his own chute and he yanked it furiously. The pack bucked, trying to right itself in the middle of the major’s rolling rotation. Simultaneously the chute cut the descent velocity and mastered the spin, sending a jolt through Mortensen that he could feel in his eyeballs.

Now his eyes had stopped swimming with motion, Mortensen got a grip on his position. The grav-chute had slowed his descent to a mere glide about two hundred metres above the cathedra concourse. Immediately below him the god-machine Mortis Maximus stood astride the mighty adamantium doors of Artellus-Magna. The Warlord Titan was silent and still, immobilised as Trepkos had told them. The concourse was flooded with insurgent mobs mounting a futile assault on the colossal war machine with small arms and grenades, although this seemed more of a display than a genuine attempt to breach the Warlord’s impenetrable armour. Even the lowliest Mechanicus factory hand would know that the more optimistic options for forced entry lay with the war machine’s bridge and the weapon system’s maintenance bulkheads. And this was where a few hundred of the renegade Imperials were headed, surging up gangways and grapnels with little care for safety or sanity.

Below, Mortensen watched his storm-troopers establish a two-team perimeter on the metallic expanse of the Warlord’s armoured hood. He could make out Conklin giving the enemy troops a headache with the constant chatter of his bolter. Leaning into a course correction the major drifted above them. Firing the clips on his harness Mortensen dropped the remaining metres from his grav-chute to the chilled hull of the monstrous god-machine. He rolled into a crouch, his pack activated and his hellgun humming

Suddenly Kynt was behind him, humping the extra weight of the troop master-vox. Helmet off and blinking with his good eye through the blasts hammering the metal about them, the copper-headed comms-officer extended him the vox-hailer.

‘Major.’ Rask said.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Vector Four has a visual on the Spectre crash site, couple of clicks south of your position. The pilots confirm movement within and large numbers of enemy targets moving in on their position.’

‘How close is the convoy?’

‘Not close enough. I’ve re-routed the column but Deleval’s run into heavy resistance.’

‘Can the assault carriers reach them?’ Mortensen asked. It was the simplest choice.

‘Negative. Too dangerous. They’ve tried and already taken several hits. I’ve had them move onto the pick-up.’

‘Other options, captain?’

Rask swallowed.

‘We could head in. Vertigo could rappel our snipers down near to the crash site, while it’s still relatively quiet, and have them work their way over to the bird. Buy a bit of time until the convoy arrives.’

Mortensen grumbled to himself. The Spectres did carry marksmen for extra air cover on the dispersal. Still, he didn’t like it. The Spectre; the convoy; the snipers. Things were getting messy down on the ground.

‘Who is it?’

‘Opech and Sarakota.’

He knew about Sarakota. He’d assigned him to Vertigo. Opech was Rask’s choice: both of the snipers hailed from the feral world of Khongkotan, a bleak dust hole of canyons, cavern systems and backstabbing tribesmen. Whereas Sarakota spoke little, the Imperial Creed hadn’t quite imprinted itself on Opech: he was still full of tribal belligerence and was known to brawl with his brother Khongkotans. As a people, however, they had the senses of a raptor and made excellent scouts and marksmen.

The major nodded silently to himself. ‘Do it.’

‘Rask, out.’

The metal around Mortensen flashed with the ricochet of las-fire. The Titan was crawling with Mechanicus defectors, some of whom had taken up position on and around the war machine’s hulking shoulders, pinning the Redemption Corpsmen down and pushing them back. Apart from their own abandoned grav-chutes, the hood offered little in the way of cover and already Vedette’s skirmish line was retreating.

The renegades couldn’t shoot for dust – that much was clear from the wild pattern of fire – but the intensity of the assault was growing, with each new climber adding his muzzle to the collection aimed at the storm-troopers.

Suppression fire was all the corporal and her men had to offer the rebels in return, the hellguns hurling bursts of short range, power-conserving fire at the mobs. Such tactics were a necessary evil for the storm-troopers. They travelled light and moved fast: their missions dependent upon surgical execution rather than collateral damage. As Mortensen had assured Krieg, the 364th Volscian Shadow Brigade would mop up these degenerates – eventually.

Vedette clicked her hellgun briefly to automatic and bounced backward on the tips of her boots, splitting rounds between different clusters of closing insurgents. Mortensen met her at the lip of the Titan’s hood where Greco and Specialist Elek Quant were lashing lines and descenders to a sensor array.

Squatting by the virtually non-existent cover offered by the small forest of aerials, Mortensen and Vedette crouched shoulder to shoulder.

‘We lost Pryce,’ the major informed her stoically.

Vedette reached into her carapace and pulled out a piece of shattered chrome shell, trailing leads, valves and gore. ‘Trepkos.’

‘Great,’ he snarled back. ‘Plan B.’

The Mordian was way ahead of him and turned to present Quant and TFC Greco.

‘Run a bypass on the bridge main-hatch runelock,’ Mortensen barked at Greco, who gave him the kind of furtive, guilty look he always gave him before breaking a security system.

‘Mechs trust us to snatch the crew but they don’t trust us with the codes?’ the arch-larcenist sniffed. He’d dumped his helmet, his suit sweat-band and five o’clock shadow making his crab-face look even more horribly splayed than usual.

‘Politics,’ said the major, rolling his eyes theatrically and slipping into a harness.

‘What if I can’t… this is a Titan, after all,’ Greco put to him.

‘Just get us past the shell. Uncle can work his magic on the bulkhead mechanism.’

That’s what the Redemption Corps called Quant. He was one of the squad’s old hands. An adamantium nerve and a lifetime’s working knowledge of explosive devices had made him an easy choice for demolitions specialist, and Gorskii had learned a great deal under his tutelage. ‘Okay, Uncle?’

‘We’re Redemption Corps,’ the old specialist murmured sagely under his moustache. ‘We’ll improvise.’

Snapped into his descender, Mortensen and the two corpsmen kicked off the edge of the hood and rappelled the distance between the hood and the command deck, leaving Vedette to bark orders and hold the skirmish line.

As soon as Greco’s boots hit the dome roof he slid down across the convex armour plating and onto his stomach where he went to work on the bridge top-hatch. Uncle started to assemble the demolition charge he was intending to use on the pressurised hatch bulkhead, leaving Mortensen to watch over them with his droning hellgun.

Greco was surprisingly fast. The trooper simply lay back, resting his head on one arm as though he were reclining in an obscura den. The hull shell sighed and parted, leaving a circular opening gaping to the sky. ‘Progenium installations have better security than that,’ the spire-breaker told them. ‘You know, there was this one time–’

‘Greco.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Shut up.’

‘All yours, old man,’ the TFC told Quant, shifting back up the metal dome. The specialist moved in with his charge, trailing detonator cable and tools.

His charge assembled, Uncle began to back up the hull himself, a palm grip detonator in one fist. The three men backed in under the hood and put their backs against the cool hull.

‘Ready?’

Uncle nodded.

‘Should we really be standing on the command deck?’ Greco put to them at the last moment. ‘You know, if we’re gonna like, well, blow it up?’

‘It’s a directional charge,’ the demolitions man informed him icily.

‘Oh,’ Greco muttered. ‘Good safety tip.’

Uncle clasped the detonator and the hatch vomited forth skull-splitting sound and light. A peal of thunder rolled through the command deck superstructure and the armour plating immediately around the opening creaked and buckled. A cloud of blistering white smoke pumped from the hatch. Donning his gloves and hellgun, Uncle skirted down the slippery hull and vanished, making a corpsman-shaped hole in the smoke.

A few moments later Mortensen’s vox-bead crackled.

‘I’m in.’

The major grinned, adjusting the troop channel: ‘Sergeant Conklin, Corporal Vedette. Fall back by teams to the Titan command deck.’

‘Affirmative, major.’

IV

‘Send us down another dead-end and I’m going to come up there and rip you one, you hear me, flyboy?’ That was Deleval: Lieutenant, Fourth Platoon. It didn’t really matter to Krieg, although he was ashamed to admit that the Volscians all looked the same to him. There was little to pick between the officers and the men when it came to uniform and physical appearance; a complete lack of respect for Tactica formulations was equally evident in either.

Deleval was a charmer though. He was one of those tough hive bastards – the swill of corruption running in his veins. He had a hard face and unforgiving eyes that wouldn’t have been out of place on a bounty hunter. Lieutenant’s stripes or not, Deleval’s word was law amongst the men of his platoon. Anything else was simply an invitation to wake up the next morning with your throat slit: if you were unlucky enough to wake up at all. Snyder, Turkle and Goinz, the three hive-world hyenas that sat behind him would have seen to that all right.

Krieg had heard Captain Rask call Fourth Platoon the ‘Zombie Squad’, primarily because it was largely made up of the worst kind of Volscians the 364th had to offer – brutal gangers and psychotics, unable to live without the blood and carnage of the underhive and who found new expressions of their old lives in the merciless way in which they interpreted their orders. Deleval himself was rumoured to hail from the notorious Jericho Hive, the site of a spook war that had raged across several generations for nearly a century.

This was, of course, the other reason Deleval and his men had earned their moniker – regimental supplies of spook, mankweed, gladstones, PNP, hulk dust and various unlicensed combat stimulants chiefly came from the Zombie Squad and their illicit contacts and suppliers.

Deleval’s henchmen were typical Zombie Squad scum. They’d spent most of the run eyeballing Krieg and exchanging hazy slurs about the commissar. Without the reassuring presence of Golliant, barely squeezed into the seat next to him, Krieg was certain the Volscians would have riddled him with scatter shot from their combat shotguns and rolled his body out the back of the moving Centaur and under the tracks of the next. Snyder – a savage little scavver with a receding shock of wiry, ginger hair – and the loudmouth Turkle had to content themselves with goading the commissar and filling the compartment with nefarious laughter. Goinz didn’t say much – clearly out of his eyeballs on combat stimulants – but would simply chuckle nastily to himself, seemingly out of sync with the rest of the hilarity.

Blazer One had been less than helpful with directions, sending Deleval’s convoy down more than one improvised cul-de-sac, where revolutionaries had toppled structures, erected barricades and stacked burnt-out cargo-10’s and dozerloaders in an attempt to frustrate any kind of advance on the cathedra. It had worked.

Golliant had told Krieg that the convoy drivers were all handpicked Volscian ash buggy drivers, used to racing piles of scrap across the hellish and ever changing chemical wasteland that was their garrison home world. They were spoiled with the Centaur fire support variant: their pace and manoeuvrability put the universally admired Chimera chassis to shame. What the light carrier gained in handling, it lost in armour and armament, however, boasting only the snub barrels of a single, pintle-mounted assault cannon and heavy stubber up front for infantry support. The supercharged Centaurs did afford the hive drivers the vehicular verve they needed to put an armoured personnel carrier in positions conventional wisdom would otherwise state impossible. Compact enough to be slapped on the deck by a Navy aircraft, but able to hold its own in a firefight, the Centaur variant was a perfect fire support vehicle.

Unfortunately the labyrinthine freightways of Corpora Mons did not play to the Centaur’s strengths. The convoy’s initial run had been impressive, the cadet-commissar had to admit, the column maintaining high speeds across deserted plazas and clear thoroughfares.

It was only when the major re-directed Deleval’s column to secure the White Thunder crash site that the convoy ran into any serious resistance. The crash site wasn’t far off their route: the massive Mortis Maximus still stood sentinel above the convoy’s armoured roofs, but the Spectre had gone down in a depository complex just south of the cathedra, at the heart of a rockcrete jungle of warehouse structures and semi-permanent giga-storage crate containers. The narrow accessways in between, like cholesterol-choked arteries, were strewn with debris and abandoned freight, creating a nightmare landscape of gauntlets and bottlenecks. There wasn’t even room amongst the mayhem for a Centaur to about face and turn around.

It was here that the rebels had hit them time and again, waiting each time for obstacles to slow the convoy to a near standstill before unleashing hell from above with lasguns, rockets and grenades. With Deleval busy upfront, relaying directions from the passenger seat and manning the belt-fed heavy-stubber, Krieg had patched through to Blazer Three, their only other air support bird, instructing the Vulture to make strafing runs on the insurgent-crowded crate container rooftops. The pilot complied but was less than enthusiastic, claiming that the mobs were sending just as many rockets their way.

The Centaur rocked violently to an unexpected halt. The manoeuvre drew a furious scowl from Deleval, but Cruz, the Shadow Brigade driver, simply pointed and began manhandling the vehicle’s chunky nest of levers into reverse. The lieutenant squinted through his cracked, blood-spattered viewport before lividly snatching the mouthpiece of his headset.

‘Convoy, all stop!’

‘What?’ Krieg snapped, leaning forward over the Cruz’s shoulder to get a better view of the road ahead.

‘Blazer One, this is Ironfire. If I’m not mistaken there is a vrekkin’ train across our route,’ the lieutenant said dangerously.

Deleval wasn’t wrong. Krieg found himself staring at a bulk freight repulsomotive, alight and clearly off its magrail. The automated hovertrain probably ran to a thousand cars or more, and would cut off routes across the line, possibly for kilometres in either direction. That wasn’t the worst of it. With the convoy at a standstill and a slow meandering reverse the only way back, rebel fire hit the Centaurs with renewed confidence and clout. The cadet-commissar found himself dropping his head, despite the fire support vehicle’s reinforced armour plating. The crew compartment filled with the cacophony of las-blast impacts and thought-shattering ricochets.

Deleval’s gunner fell back through the hatch like a sack of grain, his face and uniform a las-dappled mess of smouldering flesh and scorched webbing.

‘Get on the cannon!’ Krieg called, but his order was met with glares of venomous defiance from Deleval’s men.

‘Are you out of your vrekkin’ mind?’ Snyder asked, leaning over the dead Guardsman. He slipped his hand into the furious light show outside and snatched the hatch shut. Turkle proceeded to strip the unfortunate gunner of spare ammunition and in all probability, valuables.

Deleval was still spitting oaths and threats down the vox-link when a shadow flashed across his viewport, causing him to jerk back and let rip with the heavy-stubber. The weapon chugged a fierce blast of lead up the street, but uncertain as to whether he’d hit anything, Deleval yelled at the driver, ‘You got anything?’

Cruz darted his pinched face around the viewport: ‘Nothing.’

‘Crenna?’ Deleval yelled.

‘Dead,’ Snyder shot back, his eyes not leaving Krieg’s own angry slits.

Everyone heard the clunk from up front and even Krieg was forced to break his livid stare. Its location was obvious from the way Cruz began clawing feverishly at his chair harness.

‘Del…’ he managed with white-knuckle panic, but the lieutenant had nothing but four words for him.

‘Fire in the hole!’

The detonation was sharp, deafening and somehow worse inside the confines of the small vehicle. When Krieg brought up his head he found to his heart-striking dismay that he couldn’t, leading him instantly to the sickening conclusion that he was trapped or worse – paralysed. What he found was that Golliant had leaned over to shield him and it was the weight of the monstrous aide that was actually pinning him.

Turkle, Snyder and Goinz had somehow managed to crawl out the back door and the extra ventilation cleared the acrid smog that filled the compartment. As the smoke disappeared Krieg found himself glaring at Deleval, who looked exactly the same as he had done a few seconds before. He was fiddling with the fire support’s fried comms and playing with the limp and useless levers of the driver’s station.

Cruz hadn’t been so lucky. The magtube had been small but enough to disable the near side track and crack open the Centaur’s armour plating. The vehicle’s controls and steerage had been completely mauled and the unlucky driver had had his backside blown through the top of his head.

The grizzled lieutenant was back to his helmet vox-link and climbing into the crew compartment. ‘Time to go,’ he told the commissar simply. Then into his vox-link, ‘This is Deleval. Ironfire is combat ineffective. Falling back to Baptism.’

To their surprise the three men met Snyder, Turkle and Goinz clambering back in the back of the Centaur. Turkle screamed something but it was lost in the split-second rumble and blast of Baptism behind. The detonation smacked Ironfire’s back door closed, but Deleval viciously kicked it back open. The second Centaur was no longer behind them – just a flame-swathed wreck.

Krieg jumped down with Deleval, his hellpistol out and humming furiously by his side. Golliant followed with the bodies of Cruz and the Centaur’s gunner over each broad shoulder and laid them against a nearby wall.

As with Ironfire, the rebels had been attempting to disable the second carrier’s tracks, this time with a rocket from above. The lieutenant sent his men off with a bark, to extricate the survivors, before switching back to his vox-link. ‘Staff Sergeant Bronstead, give me a perimeter and some suppression fire. We’re going to have to load bodies.’

Las-fire chugged up the dirt road around them, forcing Krieg and the lieutenant to trot alongside the convoy with Golliant bounding calmly behind. They passed a glass-eyed Goinz who was crouched with his back to one of the massive crate containers, occasionally blasting his pump action skyward in an attempt to keep the insurgents away from the roof edge immediately above them. Turkle and Snyder were rolling one of Baptism’s crew in the dust and grit nearby, his flak jacket and uniform alight. The rest of the Volscians were pouring out of the carrier’s rear, seemingly unscathed. Once again it was one of carrier drivers that had paid the price.

‘Gator’ Bronstead trudged up the freightway with thick-set indolence. His helmet was crooked and he leaned his stocky shotgun across one shoulder as though he hadn’t got the slightest intention of using it. A bulbous nose ring and belly added further colour and a scaly patch of skin running down the side of his sweaty neck – the remnant of some underhive pestilence and origin of his nickname – completed the picture. Bronstead and Krieg hadn’t met and the sergeant, like the rest of his hive-kin, didn’t fail to give the cadet-commissar a stabbing glare.

Dwarfing Bronstead for girth and even Golliant for height, a colossal mountain of flesh appeared behind the sergeant. This was Pontiff Preed, Krieg suspected. Dressed in acres of simple white robes and trailing holy relics, tomes and trinkets of faith from his thick, leather belt the priest seemed preoccupied with hiding his gargantuan bulk behind the Shadow Brigade vehicles. He was the breathing definition of an easy target.

The officers formed a circle in the shadow of Steel Sanctuary while Volscians dropped down from the vehicles and formed a hasty perimeter along the outside of the convoy. The air sang with las-fire but the Guardsmen seemed unconcerned. Only Krieg and the Pontiff appeared aware of their vulnerability: the cadet-commissar from a tactical viewpoint and Preed by virtue of pure self-preservation.

‘Right, I’m going to make this fast,’ Deleval began with authority, ‘Recover the bodies and scuttle the forward Centaurs. I don’t want insurgent scavengers using our own weapons and equipment against us. Fall back to the main avenue and continue as planned to the rendezvous.’

‘What about the Spectre crew?’ Krieg threw in above the din of the ambush.

‘They’re on their own. We tried.’

‘That’s not acceptable, lieutenant,’ Krieg informed him.

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed,’ Deleval hissed, clearly riled, ‘but there is a train across our path. What the hell do you want me to do about that? Look, we were ordered to swing by, which we’ve tried to do. Chances are if those Navy boys weren’t killed in the crash they’re gonna wish they had been – the way these mungers are coming down on us.’

‘If it were the other way round, Navy aircraft would be directed to search for us, would they not?’ Preed insisted.

Krieg found himself nodding in surprise. He shouldn’t have been. The corpulent Preed was like some massive herbivore that had no natural predators. He’d outgrown the danger of his circumstances and had little to fear from the average hiver; besides, everyone knew that he had Captain Rask’s ear. He could afford to disagree.

‘And we’ll probably have to if we remain here for much longer,’ Bronstead said gruffly.

‘We’re out of time here,’ Deleval told the group. ‘If we don’t move, and I mean now, we won’t make the Titan on time. How happy do you think the major will be then? He grabs the targets but has no convoy to transport them. With all due respect, Holy Father, you and Krieg here are on your first outing. This is what we do. We’re going after the targets. The Navy boys are on their own.’

The lieutenant went to walk away – a clear signal that the impromptu meeting was over. Bronstead began to peel away also.

‘Give me a couple of your men,’ Krieg called after him. His voice was thick with grit and it was difficult to tell whether he’d made a request or given an order. ‘We can make our way on foot and work up to the crash site. If we can get the survivors back to your original route on the other side of the track, so be it. You’ve got to negotiate the train anyway. If not, you can go on, as planned, and make the pick-up.’

The platoon leader turned on his heel, a savage stream of las-fire cutting in between them. The mighty Preed shrugged affirmation. The lieutenant’s face was screwed up with hate and annoyance, but the deep lines gradually faded as he took in the young commissar from boot to cap. Something seemed to suddenly amuse him.

‘Done. I’ll go one better. You can have three men,’ Deleval told him, before yelling across his shoulder at the Guardsmen behind. ‘Turkle, Snyder, Goinz, front and centre! You’re going with the commissar.’

Krieg had expected a stream of complaints and oaths or even a downright refusal from the hivers. What he got was sly looks, through slitted eyes and a maniacal snigger from Goinz.

‘Thanks,’ Krieg mumbled, a little off guard.

‘See you on the other side,’ Deleval taunted and walked off with Bronstead at his side. Preed nodded slowly at Krieg, readjusted his monocle and then turned to follow.

The three Volscians slid their backs against the wall of a nearby cargo container for cover and had begun feverishly slotting fat cartridges into the breeches of their shotguns. Golliant was back after a brief absence. He’d deposited the Ironfire’s casualties in the back of one of the other Centaurs and had liberated Deleval’s heavy stubber from its forward mounting inside the blasted fire support vehicle. The weapon was a real monster, boasting a pistol grip and carry handle on the top of its belt-fed body and a long, fat, air-cooled barrel to deliver the bad news to its unfortunate targets. Krieg’s aide had also stripped the vehicle of available ammunition, draping spare belts of bullets across each shoulder.

‘Goll, you don’t have to come. Go with the convoy…’

Steel Sanctuary and the column were already rolling backwards, out from under the thunderstorm of rocket-propelled grenades and las-beams the seditionists were pelting at them.

‘How am I supposed to protect you from in there?’ the hulking aide hissed with simple logic, his voice straining above the gunfire. He swung the elongated barrel of the stubber over the cadet-commissar’s head and joined the three corpsmen against the corrugated wall of the container. Snatching his hellpistol from where it sat snugly in its holster, Krieg darted after him.

V

Vertigo came in hard, low and fast.

‘Benedict, cleared to fire?’

‘Affirmative.’

‘Let’s do our worst.’

Like some vision of angelic vengeance the Spectre tore across the industriascape. Holding the stick loose but firm in one hand Rosenkrantz cycled the ammunition drums on her wing-mounted autocannons and primed both weapons with the other. Her thumb did the rest, stabbing at the fire stud and releasing two blazing streams of certain death and tracer fire across the depot roof.

The depot itself was a marksman’s dream: a rectangle of terrace roofs, catwalks and flat storage compounds. All with great cover – from the ground at least. Mobs of Mechanicus insurgents had swamped these spaces and rained firepower down on the White Thunder, which lay smashed and broken-backed on the rockcrete of the quad below. Nothing could save them from Vertigo’s own variety of explosive vengeance, though. The incessant thunder of the cannons cut furrows of charred, twisted metal into the rooftops and turned throngs of insurgents into steaming smears of bloody chum.

This was the last of the terraces and it was just as well: the cannons were almost spent. In the meantime, fearless hordes of revolutionaries had weaved their way towards the disabled aircraft, using every gutted vehicle, every stack of abandoned cargo and piece of debris they could find to use as cover. Rosenkrantz herself had contributed to this. It was the nature of war – every action had an entire host of reactions – some anticipated and some not. The first of the compound rooftops she’d hit had been absolutely crawling with enemy targets and the flight lieutenant had seen little harm in slamming a couple of rockets into the side of the building. The strategy had the desired effect, burying an entire swarm of defectors in tonnes of metal and ceramite. It had also, with the collapse of the unstable compound and several towers, spread huge pieces of cover-friendly debris across the south end of the quad and allowed large numbers of individual insurgents to close on the downed Spectre.

At least Rosenkrantz had the comfort of knowing that her efforts were not in vain. There were definitely survivors down there. On the wingless starboard side someone had got one of the door weapons operational and was dong a good job of keeping heads down with scenery-shredding bursts of heavy bolter fire. The portside had taken the brunt of the crash and rents and fractures adorning the aircraft’s hull were allowing for an intermittent, if steady, pattern of small arms fire to present a front on the other side.

Rask and Sass were behind her: the major’s adjutant his usual serious self, the captain unusually so. ‘Okay,’ Rask said, ‘these boys are ready to do this.’

Rosenkrantz understood. It had been Rask’s suggestion and now that they were here, the full scale and overwhelming futility of the situation had dawned on him. Rask clearly felt that he was sending the snipers to their deaths but believed that it was necessary if the Navy crew were to have any chance at all.

The pilot brought her assault carrier to a suicidal standstill high above her sister Spectre.

‘Chief,’ Rosenkrantz called across the vox and was rewarded with the chatter of fierce cover fire from her own door gunners. Bolt rounds sprayed the rockcrete around White Thunder, mangling cover and the occasional Mechanicus heretic, but more importantly the weapons’ higher elevation forced the hordes of kill-frenzied Illians further back.

Slick cords tumbled from the bay door and the insanely daring snipers bailed out and rappelled their way to the roof of the smashed Spectre, molested by snaps of las-fire that shot past the lines and the descending soldiers. The strategy was not without cost and Rosenkrantz’s ‘Boltmagnet’ callsign became suddenly and uncomfortably appropriate.

Vertigo rolled slightly under the weight of pure firepower being directed at an aircraft that had been all but a blur of undercarriage moments before and now presented an irresistibly stationary target. Runescreens and augurs screamed warnings from a hundred different systems. The canopy flashed and sparked as a hail of fire washed over the reinforced armaplas. Rosenkrantz blinked involuntarily.

‘Flight Lieutenant!’ Benedict called out with an unusually high level of emotion for one of his kind. Rosenkrantz had expected this. He felt what Vertigo felt. He was more part of the aircraft than the crew: the information coursing through cables and conduits wired straight into his spine from the bird’s various archaic systems was registering simply as pain.

‘Rask?’

It was hard to tell when the captain was genuinely nervous – his face was usually taut with some kind of agony from his knee. He seemed nervous now though, white fingers pressing the vox-link to pursed lips. He hesitated for a moment, unsure.

‘They’re on the ground,’ Sass finally confirmed. Rask nodded at her.

‘Well it was going to be them or us,’ Rosenkrantz sneered as she threw the vector thrust into direct ascension and blasted skyward away from the shooting gallery bellow. The cockpit auspex streamed a small saga of data at the pilot. ‘Benedict, take over,’ she called after the first hundred metres, tearing off her harness and slipping out of confines of her seat.

Sass couldn’t help feasting on the detail sweeping across the console.

‘The port tail boom’s registering a gearbox fire,’ he informed her. When she didn’t respond he added, ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

‘You think?’ she asked before pushing past Rask who gave her a feeble smile.

‘Good work,’ he told her and probably meant it.

‘I’m going down below. See how badly we’ve been hit,’ she answered coolly and pulled away. Something wasn’t right. Vertigo was hurting and she didn’t need to be Benedict to feel it.

VI

Merciless and quiet, Krieg and the Volscians slipped through the smoke-spuming wreckage of the south compound and up through the warren of debris that had redecorated the quad floor.

A deafening cascade of fire flew overhead from the depot roofs and terraces – all directed at the blast-ridden Spectre. The aircraft was a sorry sight, but gave the Imperials the distraction they needed to work up through the enemy line undetected. The din of gunfire bouncing off the walls of the compound hid the cold-blooded blasts of the Zombie Squad Corpsmen as they trotted up behind Illian rebels, hiding behind girders and smashed slabs of rockcrete. Snyder and his cronies had no problem with shooting the boilersuited figures in the back, slickly working the pumps on their combat shotguns before riddling another unsuspecting heretic with shot and moving on. It was a brutal but effective procedure, leaving Golliant’s heavy stubber to deal with any unwanted attention moving in from their flanks and Krieg to handle the rear.

They were moving at quite a pace, the shotgun crew ahead seemingly drawn on less by a desire to reach the Spectre than a dead-eyed thirst to spread blood across the esplanade. This gave Krieg little to contend with, very few of the insurgents moving in on White Thunder were faster than they were.

A begoggled lab-tech, making a dash between two warped girders, nearly ran straight into Krieg. The shock of finding an Imperial commissar in his path was a little more than disconcerting and the lasgun he was carrying came up a moment too late. Krieg blew a furious beam of supercharged laser fire through his chest, stopping the Mechanicus menial dead in his tracks.

In the no-man’s-land between the crash site and the nearest cover, matters were less simple. Small pockets of insurgents who had successfully worked their way up to the downed assault carrier gathered in tight groups. With little in the way of communication, Snyder, Turkle and Goinz switched tactics from wholesale slaughter to a more cautious approach. Getting in position to make the run across to the aircraft they only gunned down those rebels that became aware of their position and intentions. This in turn stirred up a hornets’ nest for Krieg and his aide, who were coming up from behind.

One particularly determined group rushed the two men from the servo-carriage of a toppled crane. The crisp crack of las-bolts surrounded them as the gang, still wearing their tight-fitting, rubber filter-hoods, came at them with furious firepower.

The ear-splitting chatter of the heavy stubber cut the group in two as well as several individual revolutionaries. Krieg stood his ground – storm-trooper style – his back and arm straight and his hellpistol moving smoothly and surely from one target to the next, lancing them with hotshot. The gang was completely pumped and wild, most of their bolts veering and going wide. Several got lucky and plucked at his greatcoat and it was perhaps this that made Krieg miss his own target.

They were running at him thick and fast and it had been a miracle he’d created the small mound of bodies that he had. His last shot had been intercepted by one of the crane’s crumpled, plasteel cross-beams and several heretics slipped through Golliant’s withering arc of fire and pressed their advantage in the face of Krieg’s first mistake.

The leader of the group fired, missed and then proceeded to throw his hooded head and shoulder into Krieg’s midriff. Krieg went down in an untidy heap, splitting his efforts between smashing the grip of his hellpistol across his assailant’s blank, rubber face and blasting spasmodically at the shapes of the remaining defectors, who were skidding to the ground beside him, intent on holding down his arms.

The Mechanicus menial on top of him sat upright, his legs astride the commissar’s prone form – the barrel of the lasgun gripped in two hands – the weapon’s ugly stock wavering above Krieg’s snarling face. In the muffled confusion the cadet-commissar noticed that the heavy stubber wasn’t firing anymore. At first he thought that it had run dry, but an awkward glimpse under the arm of his attacker revealed the weapon lying abandoned in the dust and Golliant, impossibly set upon by six or seven hooded individuals, smacking his foes into the ground with his close combat weapons of choice – the two flight deck club hammers that usually sat snug in his belt.

Everything was still for a moment. Krieg’s arms had been pinned to the ground and his pistol knocked from his grip. Ghoulish breath sounds filled the air as the hooded heretics, gasping with exertion, held him still.

It wasn’t a great swing and nowhere near enough to take his head away from his shoulders, but it felt like it. The stock had flashed in front of his eyes, making contact with his cheekbone and dashing his skull into the esplanade. Numb with shock, Krieg found himself keeping it there. A dribble of warm blood rolled across his face from the gash on his cheek and pooled in his eyes. Blinking red ooze, the commissar found himself staring across the quad, the ground-level angle odd and disorientating. He saw Turkle and Goinz bolt across the open ground towards the shattered fuselage of the downed aircraft. Snyder was standing looking back at him, a sinister smugness hanging from a curled lip. He shouldered the squat combat shotgun he was carrying, turned and bolted likewise, leaving Golliant and the cadet-commissar to get on with the business of dying.

The backswing had taken an eternity but finally it came. The same reverberating deadness in his head; the same flush of blood: this time across the other side of his face. With the world running at slow motion around him, Krieg had time to consider how scars running across both cheeks would make him look like some kind of duellist.

He couldn’t tell which came first, the sound or the sensation, but suddenly he could move his left arm. The flood of movement and relief was accompanied by a crashing thud and fresh blood on his face – this time not his own. Two more shadows disappeared and as he came back to his senses he saw the revolutionary sitting astride his chest, torn from his seat and his head come apart. With splatter still falling around him, the cadet-commissar managed to roll onto his stomach.

From the darkness of one of the Spectre’s side doors Krieg could make out the shape of a bipod, the glint of a scope and the long, thick barrel of an anti-materiel sniper rifle. Their closest relative was the ubiquitous long-las, favoured by many a Guard sniper. Redemption Corps marksmen often needed something a little harder hitting for knocking out equipment and suppressing light vehicles, as well as blowing superfluously large holes in enemy combatants. Essentially a large calibre rifle, the fearsome weapon took the same ammunition as an autocannon and hit just as hard.

Scooping up his hellpistol, sitting in the grit just centimetres out of reach, Krieg turned the weapon on the swarm of bodies all over Golliant’s massive frame. Somehow the aide had just kept swinging his hammers, to devastating effect, even with several rebels hanging off each arm. The numbers had easily doubled since the last time the commissar had glimpsed him and the wrestler was going down under the pure weight of his assailants. Aiming cock-eyed from the ground, Krieg sent a string of sizzling fire into the backs of the hooded workers. Alarmed, some made the mistake of turning their backs on Golliant to face Krieg but got a hammer in the back of the skull for their trouble. Caught in the crossfire of the commissar’s pistol and the Volscian’s brawny reach the rebels rapidly became a carpet of bodies at the brute corpsman’s feet.

Snatching the heavy stubber in one hand and dragging a dazed Krieg to his feet with the other, Golliant marched them across the open ground, the reassuring crash of sniper fire all around them.

Inside the troop bay of White Thunder the darkness was startling. It was a shock after the glare of the open quad and it took Krieg’s eyes a moment to adjust. Beams of dust speckled sunlight crisscrossed the bay from holes and rents in the fuselage caused by the crash and some of the heavier weapons carried by the mobs outside. The only functioning heavy bolter kicked out an unrelenting roar from the starboard side and the Spectre crew fired warning shots from their laspistols through holes and doorways on the opposite side. Only just arriving themselves, Snyder, Turkle and Goinz crouched in the middle of the shattered troop bay, catching their breath. They eyed the commissar moodily, reloading their shotguns and taking swigs from their canteens.

Down on the ground by Krieg’s feet lay one of Mortensen’s storm-troopers wrapped around the brutal angularity of an anti-materiel sniper rifle. He wasn’t even looking through the scope but was firing with complete confidence and in a steady rhythm.

‘Thank you,’ the commissar told the sniper. He didn’t answer – just angled his almond face and nodded slowly, continuing to fire and from the screams outside, hit his targets.

‘How–’ the commissar began.

‘The respirators in their hoods, mostly,’ the Khongkotan trooper told him solemnly, ‘and the hum of your pistol.’ Obviously the sniper was used to questions from new blood in the squad. From a commissar he probably took the question as an order. ‘Also, the mechheads: they smell different.’

Krieg looked down at the hellpistol in his holster, the cable running between the handgrip and the power pack on his belt. Turning his nose to his shoulder he took an experimental sniff.

‘And your coat,’ came a bitter voice from the far end of the bay, ‘sounds like foil through a vox-hailer – even from across the damn quad.’

Another feral worlder sat upright against the Spectre’s worm-holed hull. He clutched his rifle awkwardly to his chest as though afraid to let it go. As Krieg’s eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness he saw why: the marksman was a mess, riddled through with holes, not unlike the aircraft, his flak jacket smouldering.

Krieg marvelled: he’d heard of feral world tribes whose senses had attuned to their environments, not unlike the savage, predatory mega-fauna they shared their world with, but the snipers’ talents were something to behold. Krieg imagined what he could hit, if he could hear and smell as well as he could see.

The Spectre’s co-pilot, still wearing a scuffed flight helmet, was manhandling a crate of bolter ammunition from beside the wounded sniper over to the door gun. His face lit up at the sight of the commissar’s cap and greatcoat. It was not a reaction Krieg was used to. He thrust out a keen hand.

‘Boy, are we glad to see you,’ he blurted honestly. ‘Hoyt.’

Krieg didn’t bother to introduce himself. ‘Pilot?’

‘Dead.’

The commissar nodded. ‘I’ve got good news and bad. The good news is that you’re being rescued. The bad news is that we’re it.’

Hoyt’s face dropped. ‘No airlift?’

‘Too dangerous.’

‘What about the convoy?’ the injured sniper shot across the inky interior of the aircraft.

‘Can’t get through. We’re it. The convoy will pass a few kilometres to the north of here in about twenty minutes, which means if we want to be on it we’ve got to haul some.’

‘But,’ Hoyt stammered. Several Navy crewmen had stopped firing and were staring at the commissar in disbelief. ‘We’re surrounded.’

‘We got in,’ Golliant rumbled, trying to be helpful. Deleval’s men just looked at the ground, kicking empty bolter cartridges between their feet and lighting lho-sticks.

Krieg’s eyes travelled across the bay, meeting each member of the crew in turn. It was an intoxicating moment. Krieg understood the nature of leadership – he’d been an officer – but with the flight crew staring at him as though their lives depended upon it – which they did – he began to empathise with Mortensen’s predicament. Krieg could not be honest with these men. He couldn’t talk odds and harsh truths. He needed fire in their bellies. He needed them to believe in themselves and in him. Like the major, he had to make them believe that he could get them out alive. He didn’t know if that was cultish practice – as the canoness had seen it – but of all the evils it could be, at that moment in the Spectre’s troop bay, it seemed a necessary one.

‘How much bolter ammo have you got left?’ Krieg asked.

‘Plenty,’ Hoyt told him. ‘We’ve got enough for four guns, but only one is operational.’

‘Golliant, help me.’

Between them Krieg and the aide took the crate the co-pilot had been carrying and dumped the contents in a pile in the centre of the bay. Then to the baffled crewmen: ‘In order to make it out of the complex we’re going to need a diversion. Pile every piece of ammunition you can find and stop firing that gun.’

‘Stop firing?’ an injured crew chief started incredulously, his arm bound with a hasty a sling.

‘They’ll think the gun’s dry and that’ll draw them in on the starboard side.’

‘Excuse me, sir, but why would we want to do that?’ Hoyt asked politely.

‘Because we want as many of them as close to the bird as possible when we blow it up,’ Krieg stated simply.

‘We have no detonators, what do you think you’re going to use as a charge?’ Snyder sneered.

Krieg shrugged off the insolence and looked over at the Redemption Corps sniper who had saved his life.

‘Think you could hit a fuel tank with that thing?’

VII

Mortensen had never been inside a god before. It wasn’t at all like he’d imagined. For a thing that looked so impressively gargantuan on the outside, it was a testament to claustrophobia inside the thick armour plating. A perpendicular tour puzzle of crawlspaces, gantries, bulkheads and laddershafts, the Mortis Maximus had swallowed the Redemption Corps whole.

Power was out the length of the Titan and the command deck had been dead and eerily empty. Snapping muzzle lamps to their hellguns, the storm-troopers descended, their swift but wary cover formation cutting patterns through the pitch darkness with the beams of their torches.

The major had had Greco seal the command deck sky hatch he’d originally hacked in order to avoid any unwelcome visitors coming in from the rear and through Uncle’s ragged opening. He then had the troop split into three small groups under Conklin, Vedette and himself. While the master sergeant pushed on into the thorax network of modules and engineering vestibules below, Vedette and Mortensen took their sweeps in opposite directions, exploring the maintenance ducts and ordnance vaults above the mighty super-heavy weapons mounted on each colossal arm.

Vedette’s team had drawn the Volcano Cannon protruding from the left arm of the massive Titan, meaning that her sweep consisted of a tour of the very heart of the god-machine: the dormant plasma reactor, that ordinarily powered not only the devastating Volcano cannon but the Titan’s very automotive functions.

Mortensen on the other hand was landed with the nightmare of the gigantic gatling blaster. His men moved swiftly and silently through the darkness of room after room packed to the gills with mega bore bolt rounds, ready to fall upon instruction through the autoloader vents below and directly into the open breech of each titanic, revolving barrel.

‘Major,’ a voice came softly across the micro-bead. ‘Best get up here.’

Mortensen worked his way up through a series of pokey, valve encrusted cubicles and padded along a narrow corridor. Trooper Teague had been leading the way but was currently waiting for him against a pressure hatch.

The major had taken an instant liking to Teague. Elysians spent their lives in the air and so the young trooper was a natural drop-soldier, despite his tender years.

The two men crouched in the companionway for a moment.

‘And…’ Mortensen prompted. Teague thought he could see it. He casually waved his hellgun in a wide arc in front of them. The lamp beam struggled with the black depths but revealed enough to prompt the major to add his own.

It was incredible. Smack bang in front of them the claustrophobic confines of the god-machine gave way to a small oasis of open space. It wasn’t a conduit or chamber; it wasn’t even square. A perfect sphere of freedom had been cut out of the restrictions of the thoracic decks. Metal decking, support struts, cabling and instrumentation all ended in polite, clean lines around the open space. Teague ran a finger over one curved edge, seemingly cut from a bulkhead.

‘Smooth,’ Teague told the major. ‘Never seem anything like it. What kind of a tool can do that?’ Mortensen nodded with hesitation. The Elysian was right of course: even a plasma torch, which was what someone would need to do something like this, left rough edges. This also left the question of why anyone would want to create a spherical hole of emptiness in the middle of a Titan. Mortensen’s stomach tightened.

The major’s micro-bead chirped. It was Conklin.

‘Crew located, boss.’

That was something. ‘Where?’

‘Engineering – Thorax East, deck six, Void Shield Generator Room. Or at least that’s what it says on the blast doors,’ the sergeant came back.

‘Status?’

‘No idea. Something’s got ’em spooked because we’ve identified ourselves and they ain’t raising these doors for anything.’

‘Stand by. We’re coming down.’ Mortensen switched channels. ‘Vedette, you getting this?’

‘Receiving, major.’ As usual the Mordian officer was ever ready, monitoring the vox-traffic.

‘Time to regroup. How’s your sweep?’

‘You might want to take a look at the plasma reactors. Someone’s ripped the hell out of them.’

Mortensen mulled it over: Vedette wasn’t given to exaggeration.

‘No time. Meet me downstairs.’

‘Affirmative,’ she returned without question.

‘Vedette,’ Mortensen cut in before she signed off. ‘Detonators or small arms?’ There was a pause.

‘By hand, sir.’

The major turned slowly towards the black emptiness and shone his barrel lamp up at a maintenance opening about six metres above them on the other side.

‘Can you make that?’ he put to Teague. The storm-trooper took it as a friendly insult: Mortensen had asked him to scale, crawl down and hang off worse things than that before. The major nodded. ‘Push on and sweep the operational ordnance compartments. Anything out of the ordinary, I want to know about it. Otherwise, make your way down to ground level and the pick-up. Understood?’

By way of a reply, the nimble Elysian snapped his hellgun to his pack and vaulted the first gap. Without fear he took a succession of near gymnastic steps before launching himself up into an exposed set of coolant lines.

‘Major,’ he called, hanging by one hand and turning slightly. ‘I’ll beat you down there.’

Mortensen left the young soldier to his acrobatics and began his own descent.

It didn’t take long for the major to reacquire his squad. As the bullet flew Conklin wasn’t far below them, despite taking a spinal column ladderwell directly into the Engineering sub-levels. The major met Conklin cradling his bolter by the secured blast doors.

‘How do you know they’re in there?’

‘Took a shot at us, didn’t they,’ Greco croaked from behind. He was sitting on a barrel of lubricant behind the open bulkhead. Minghella was with him, his back to the major and his head bobbing up and down as he went to work on a field dressing.

‘You took one?’ Mortensen asked.

‘In the foot.’ Uncle smirked, which was something he rarely did.

‘Laugh it up,’ Greco shot moodily, his usual good humour gone.

‘They secured the blast doors and locked them off,’ Quant continued, smiling. ‘Emperor knows where they’re getting the power. Engineers probably rigged something temporary.’

Mortensen suppressed the involuntary curl of his own lips. ‘Will he pull through, sergeant?’ he put to Minghella sarcastically. He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Good. TFC Greco, hobble that bony ass of yours over here and hack those blast doors.’

Kicking off the barrel and sporting an exaggerated limp the storm-trooper made his way across, using the cool passage wall for support. He snatched his satchel of tools from an amused Uncle and trailed a ribbon of bandage where Minghella had not had time to secure the dressing. As Greco hacked into the hydraulic rune mechanism with his equipment he muttered guttural hive oaths to himself.

‘How many?’ Mortensen asked.

‘I saw the flash of five barrels, at least,’ Conklin informed him.

The door mechanism made an unhealthy sounding clearance before juddering open. Greco shambled back before snatching up his weapon, as well he might. As the robust door rolled open the Redemption Corps were met with the glare of bioluminarc lamps and a thicket of las barrels – primed and pointed.

After a dumbfounded second, storm-troopers’ barrels followed suit; accompanied by the flash of open palms from both sides. Some screaming and bawling ensued with Mortensen’s harsh roar coming out on top.

‘Get those vrekkin’ rifles on the ground!’

A crate-chested chief engineer waved an improvised flamer in his face and a spindly tactical officer, his cranial lines and plugs gathered together in a ragged pony tail, slid the long barrel of a lasgun over the engineer’s shoulder. ‘We’re Redemption Corps, you slut-mongerers. This is asset recovery: someone wants you plugging in somewhere else, so unless you want to be walking out of here with a serious physical impediment – like death – you’ll lay your weapons on the deck.’

A pistol came down and a woman in a black uniform and cap stepped forward, running her slender fingers along the trembling barrels and pushing them to the floor. She had rich, unsmiling lips and an eye-patch to match her dour uniform.

‘Princeps Hess,’ she enlightened him as her crew placed their weapons on the generator room floor. ‘The Mortis Maximus is mine.’

‘Not for much longer,’ Mortensen informed her with casual hive-world smarm. ‘My men are going to walk you out of here. A convoy of carriers will then take you out of the hotzone and you’ll be airlifted to safety. That’s the plan, but don’t quote me on it.’

‘No.’

‘No?’ Mortensen wasn’t used to people refusing his offer of rescue. ‘You’re the second person today who was under the misapprehension that they can give me orders. I must be losing my powers of persuasion. But you see that’s why I’ve got this.’ He brought up his hellgun and shone the lamp into her remaining eye. ‘It speaks a variety of different languages but even that doesn’t matter because actions – I’m reliably informed – are louder than words.’ He primed the rifle savagely.

‘The god-machine has been infiltrated and somehow sabotaged from the inside. That’s why we are immobilised; that’s why we’re hiding in the generator room. This hallowed Titan cannot be left in the hands of the enemy.’

‘It can,’ Mortensen assured her, ‘and it will. That’s not within my mission parameters. Some idiot determined that your bony backsides were worth recovering and my men have in turn risked their own lives to achieve that end. We’re not here to save your damn machine, princeps. That’s someone else’s headache, thankfully. We came for you. So if you’d be so kind, my men can only hold a perimeter for so long.’

‘Our weapons…’

‘My men can handle your security. I don’t trust your trigger finger, anyways. You might be able to sunder worlds in this thing, but you shoot like cripples. You had a clean shot and the element of surprise and you pranged one of my men in the foot for Throne’s sake. Don’t worry though; he had it coming.’ Mortensen span, looking for Conklin.

‘Sergeant, take the men and get the bridge crew and engineering staff here down to ground level as soon as possible. Double-time it. Be on your guard – we have unfriendlies in here.’ Mortensen cast a disparaging eye over Hess and her crew as they began filing out.

‘Affirmative.’

‘Kynt: raise Deleval. Make sure that convoy is in position for our exit. Don’t take any crap from that Volscian piece of trash. If he gives you any trouble, tell him it’ll be my boot up his backside.’ The young comms-officer nodded his freckled face and went to work on his equipment.

Mortensen started drifting towards the opposite exit.

‘What about you?’ Vedette put to him.

‘I think I know how the infiltrators got in. Teague’s up there.’

‘I’ll go,’ the Mordian insisted, heading for the companionway.

‘I sent him, I’ll get him,’ Mortensen growled, stopping her in her tracks. ‘You make sure the Titan crew get to the ground alive.’ The major streaked off in the opposite direction, leaving Vedette to protect the rear of the escort, his voice the only clear thing in the swirl of shadow. ‘That might be harder than you think.’

It wasn’t difficult to find his way back up the autoloaders, but Mortensen made considerably harder work of negotiating the sphere of open emptiness beyond than Trooper Teague had.

In Fire Control the major found signs of life, or more accurately: impending death. Scores of servitors, charged with the smooth operation and maintenance of the colossal gatling blaster, had been ripped from their stations and butchered. Heads littered the deck with the kind of sickly, flesh-drawn grins servitors were given to. Blood and the black arterial oil that ran through the drones’ bodies ran down the walls and pooled around the dismembered corpses.

This didn’t feel like renegade Mechanicus menials. This was something else. Mortensen moved through the carnage with cautious urgency, swinging his hellgun around corners and up through vents and hatches.

A ripple in the darkness. Mortensen came to terms with the reality that he wasn’t alone. The sting of vulnerability brought up the hairs on the back of his neck; the scrape of a footstep on the deck up ahead; the vanishing glint of an eye in his roving lamp. He was so preoccupied with these distractions that he almost missed Teague.

With all the gore and butchery already on show in the murky fire control station, the young Elysian’s battered, blood-drenched body hardly seemed to merit a second glance. He was hanging in the chains of a block and tackle, his arms and head drooped through loops of an ammunition hoist. He’d been completely run through with some kind of wicked blade and his body was criss-crossed with deep gouges that were still leaking his lifeblood all over the mounds of ammunition below. He was dead though – that much was certain.

Mortensen suddenly had the feeling that someone was walking over his grave; if his grave had been the deck floor directly behind him then he would have almost certainly been right. Gripping his rifle tightly in both hands he span around, ready to unleash fully-automatic hell on his stalker. Whoever it was he was big, powerful and had reflexes the major hadn’t accounted for. A fist came smashing down on the barrel, sending the weapon clattering to the floor. The powerful foot stamped down into the rifle’s breech, impossibly crushing the converter underfoot, before scraping it backwards across the deck, tearing its power cable from Mortensen’s pack.

The compartment descended into complete darkness as the weapon’s muzzle smacked into the wall and smashed the lamp. Something like a hand slipped around his neck from behind and enveloped his throat in a vice-like grip. Mortensen’s first instinct was to tear at the fingers with his own. His boots were off the ground now and the air in his lungs disappearing fast. The digits weren’t moving, however, kept there by an incredible force of will and bulging tendons. If Mortensen hadn’t been so preoccupied with the fading oxygen in his lungs, more of his panic-stricken thoughts might have been devoted to the strange, ribbed and leathery fingers grasping for him. It was probably some Mechanicus maniac in a pressure suit, the major reasoned, but he couldn’t help considering the possibility that Krieg was in fact correct and he was in the presence of some malformed, chaotic mob devoted to some unholy cult. As he relived the moments of the attack through his blurring consciousness he could swear that he’d seen multiple limbs and claws.

His flailing boots had caught several limbs and bodies in the blackness and Mortensen suspected that he was surrounded. This was confirmed when some kind of blade slashed across his midriff, slicing through his carapace and into his stomach. He couldn’t feel the pain of course, just the ugly tugging of flesh as it gave and tore in a ragged gash. His hands instinctively clutched his belly and were almost immediately slippery with blood.

His thumb brushed his belt and following it with his fingers he found his way to his holster and side arm. Snatching the autopistol in a fast-fading grip he brought the heavy pistol up, rested the top of the snub, quivering barrel on his shoulder and pulled the trigger.

Something died behind him. Mortensen’s limp body tumbled to the floor. He couldn’t quite describe the inhuman screech his assailant had made, but he’d heard more death-cries than most people and he knew that they were all sickeningly individual. A fully-automatic blast of autofire in the face couldn’t be good news for anyone.

On his knees he bent over and kept pressure on the gaping wound across his stomach. In the dark it was impossible to tell how deep it was but he was pretty sure that his guts were still where they should be. With his forehead resting on the cold metal of the deck he could feel the tremor of heavy footfalls all around him and fearing another attack, let loose blindly with the remaining rounds in the pistol.

The savage roar of the weapon seemed to drive them back; he might even have clipped one or two of them. He fumbled in the darkness for a second clip but the magazine slipped through his blood-sticky fingers and onto the floor. It was a horrible feeling. With the sensitivity of his skin reduced to a cool numbness he relied heavily on sight for dexterity. Long gone were the days he could strip down an autopistol blindfolded. In the darkness his eyes could tell him nothing and he couldn’t tell whether or not he was touching the magazine or the floor. He could hear at least and had to listen to heavy footfalls approach. The horde was back. In a rage of frustration Mortensen abandoned the clip and went for his last magazine. Slamming it home he scrambled messily across the floor, hand scrabbling around in his own gore.

As gnarled and knotty appendages caressed the back of his armour he swung the autopistol behind him as both club and firearm, the short barrel sweeping the compartment, trailing the bright arc of a muzzle flash. It was a strange couple of seconds. It was a relief to have his fingers around something reassuringly unwieldy.

In the momentary illumination provided by the hot gases escaping the autopistol’s barrel, Mortensen picked out the bulkhead by which he’d entered. The ghostly forms of his assailants were also fleetingly visible, moving with inhuman speed and receding with the shadows. The overwhelming impression, in the dull environment of the Titan interior, was one of colour: puce green flesh.

There was the swiftest notion of filthy fangs and claws, and his stalkers’ bulbous bulk was decorated with corrugated flak and tattered robes. Greenskins. Greenskins on board the Titan. Greenskins here on Illium: just not like any greenskins Mortensen had seen before. Or half seen – Mortensen had only been privy to the barest glimmer in the lightless confines of the fire control station.

Crawling arm over arm for the bulkhead, the major kept the monsters at bay with short, sporadic blasts behind and around him as he dragged himself across the smooth floor. Lugging his torso across the bulkhead threshold, Mortensen pulled his legs through before slamming the heavy hatch closed. He could feel the rumble of a final desperate charge as the bulkhead swung shut, but he was already spinning the wheel-lock on the other side. With the hatch locked-off and pressure sealed, Mortensen rested the back of his head against the bulkhead but found himself rapidly kicking away from the door as a thunderstorm of blows rained down on the reinforced metal from beyond. Where successive impacts found purchase the hatch had begun to warp and buckle.

Mortensen couldn’t believe it. He and Krieg had been wrong. A cult undoubtedly existed here, but not one devoted to forbidden gods as the commissar had speculated. Instead an alien sect had infected the fabricator moon, celebrating the potent brutality of their Kaligari Cradle neighbours – greenskin invaders out of the Gargasso Deeps. He shouldn’t have been so surprised: Bellona, Scythia and Calydon Prime had all been hit and the stars of a number of greenskin warlords were certainly on the rise. It wasn’t entirely unprecedented either: heretical human and greenskin alliances were not unknown, especially during extended campaigns where local populations of besieged worlds felt that their Emperor had abandoned them. The Burdock Worlds could hardly be considered major strategic targets, despite the speed with which they were sundered. Illium wasn’t some backwater agri-world and the Lazareth System was a major strategic target. Too big for a single warlord, with little more than a few crop balls of momentum under his belt. Savage greenskins simply did not operate like this. Something was deeply wrong here.

These thoughts and more haunted Mortensen in the thick darkness of the passage, with the hammer of blows ringing in his ears. He had more pressing concerns, however, like getting down to ground level, through the Titan’s labyrinthine interior, without spilling every drop of his precious blood. Pushing himself up against the wall he stumbled forward into the blackness, occasional blasts from the side arm lighting his way.

VIII

The escape had run as much to plan as Krieg had any right to expect. A toppled security tower had provided the group with some much needed cover as they exited the Spectre on the least lethal side of the quad. The commissar’s insistence that the silent heavy bolter would draw the enemy in had proved accurate with huge mobs of insurrectionists able to work their way up to within a stone’s throw from the fuselage.

Krieg was the last out, allowing Snyder, Turkle and Goinz to provide a wall of scatter shot to shield the Navy crew’s flight. Golliant had not only the weight of the heavy stubber harnessed to his wrestler’s frame, but also hauled one of the aircraft’s stretchers over the masonry-strewn court behind him. The wounded Khongkotan sniper was strapped into the bouncing gurney, crying out with every bump and feeling especially vulnerable on the occasions the aide had to drop him, reach around and awkwardly gun down approaching insurgents with his stubber.

Sprinting for the cover of the collapsed tower, Krieg kept his head low to allow the storm-trooper sniper he’d met inside room to line up his shot. Krieg had learned his name was Sarakota and that his injured compatriot was Opech: both tribesmen. There was little love lost between the two soldiers, however, Sarakota being the cold, commonsensical type and his brother-savage the militant loudmouth. Their marksmanship was the only thing the pair truly shared, as evidenced by the explosively precise cover fire provided by Sarakota’s anti-materiel rifle as the group abandoned the aircraft.

As Krieg skidded to a halt in the gravel and dust around the tower he gave the order and the sniper popped a round in the Spectre’s portside fuel tank. A chain reaction of faltering explosions tore White Thunder apart, vaporising the bloodthirsty crowds that had breached the aircraft and flooded her troop bay intent on discovering survivors. A backwash of flame and fury sanitised the surrounding area, leaving hundreds of closing revolutionaries scalded and aflame. With a small mushroom cloud of raging black smoke rising in the centre of the quad, fire from the compound roofs stuttered to a full stop. There were some isolated pockets of celebration and cheering but largely the rebel mobs were given to confused silence. Many stood up from behind cover and walked slowly towards the aircraft inferno.

Remaining concealed, the soldiers loped out of the complex with the bedraggled remains of the Navy crew in tow. This would have been a flawless escape, but for a Spetzghastian immigrant worker and his son waiting behind the ruined foundations of the tower. The smoke-stained face of the father swung out from behind a crumbling wall as he blasted the injured crew chief full in the face with a scavenged skitarii lasrifle. Simultaneously his street-urchin son took Hoyt in the shoulder with a similarly liberated pistol. The co-pilot fell back into Krieg’s arms and immediately fired back, cutting the boy in two with a beam from his own laspistol. Sarakota ran up beside, his weighty anti-materiel rifle shouldered during the run, and plugged the father several times in the chest with assured semi-automatic rounds from his autopistol side arm.

Hoyt stood stunned at what he’d done. Slaughter must have appeared different from the cockpit. The child’s screaming was already drawing unwelcome attention. Krieg handed the unsteady co-pilot to one of the Spectre door gunners and stepped forward, drawing his hellpistol.

‘Move,’ he ordered, prompting the crew on: Snyder and his cronies certainly wouldn’t wait for them. Sarakota and Golliant nodded grimly and pushed on, motioning the Navy crewmen onwards.

The commissar stood over the broken body of the child. The boy’s squeals had an odd quality to them. His eyes seemed impassive and blank. His were not cries of pain or fear. They were intended as a warning, despite their result. What had happened to this planet? Krieg could hardly imagine. ‘Because you had not the courage to be loyal…’ he informed the young rebel coldly and levelled his humming pistol.

At that moment the warning went home and scores of surrounding insurgents turned their weapons on Krieg and the fleeing line of Navy crewmen. After the lull, the firepower was explosive and harsh on the ears. Poorly aimed las-bolts cut the tower foundations to pieces, forcing Krieg to slip behind a puncture-riddled wall. He made one further attempt to implement Imperial justice but had to pull back further at the whine of a rocket winding its way down on their position. The frag-blast blew Krieg back off his feet and took apart what remained of the tower foundations and anyone else inside. Brushing grit from his eyes, the commissar stumbled to his feet, whacking his left ear with his palm until the hearing came back.

Another barrage of laser fire descended on his position and he bolted after the others with hundreds of armed Illians climbing down from the compounds and flying across the quad after him.

As he burst out of the other side of the derelict compound he found himself in a wide, dusty alleyway. Alone. His heart leapt as he saw Volscian colours flash past the far end of the freightway. Centaur after Centaur rocketed past, chewing up the sandy avenue: the convoy was here. He took a step forward but the air in front of his eyes suddenly spat with light and energy. Rifle barrels cleared broken plas from storm windows on the far side of the alley and lanced the freightway with a gauntlet of las-fire.

‘Krieg!’ came a voice from above, accompanied by the raucous bombast of shotgun fire. Scatter shot blasted out the remaining plas of the storm windows, forcing the barrels to retract. Staring up the commissar saw Snyder, Turkle and Goinz on the roof of the opposite building – a huge depository warehouse adjoining the compound complex – feverishly working their slide actions to keep up a sufficient onslaught of fire.

Further along the roof of the gargantuan warehouse Krieg could make out the Navy crewmen with Golliant and Sarakota, on each end of the stretcher, making for the convoy at a sprint. The freightway was clearly a suicide run and the hivers had directed them up an escarpment of rubble and wreckage left behind from Vertigo’s earlier rocket run. With shouting and gunfire already on his coat-tails the commissar had little option but to do likewise and threw himself up the mound, clawing his way skyward.

Turkle’s sweaty palm was waiting for him at the bolt-bathed summit and Krieg allowed the Volscian to heave him over the lip of the depository roof. Breathless and exhausted Krieg pushed himself to his feet and began the scramble for the convoy. For the second time in as many minutes the cadet-commissar found himself alone.

Turning, he found the Zombie Squad standing behind him, their combat shotguns held at the hip, the gaping muzzles pointed squarely at him. Krieg twitched for his pistol, but Snyder shook his head darkly.

‘Ah-ah. Lose the piece. Slowly.’

‘The convoy is just down there,’ Krieg told them, taking his hellpistol from its holster by the tips of his fingers and unclipping his belt power pack.

‘Vox, too.’

The cadet-commissar unplugged his earpiece and wound it up with the side-arm. He tossed it to Turkle who snatched it out of the air with admiration. Krieg remained silent, flicking his eyes all around the roof for anything that might tip the odds in his favour. The roof was bare, however, bar the ragged holes the Spectres had blasted into it earlier and it was onto the edge of one of these the hivers had backed him.

‘It’s nothing personal,’ Turkle told him. ‘Eckhardt was an effete pig. But he’s a Volscian pig. Clan code, you see?’

‘One day, they’re gonna stop sending you schola-swine,’ Snyder blurted with venom, ‘but until they do, there’s a saying of Volscia – You got the shot, you better take it.’

Krieg’s mind whirled: at first he thought this was Mortensen’s doing. He’d only ever heard of Eckhardt from literature on the 1001st’s revolt.

Turkle gave him a cruel grin and brought his weapon up.

‘Wait…’ Krieg managed, but Goinz had already fired.

The impact alone was nauseating, beyond the untold damage wrought by the deadly weapon. The air was knocked clean out of Krieg’s lungs and the shot threw him backwards. Successive blasts caught his side and shoulder, spinning him around and towards the hole in the warehouse roof. A crippling shot square in the small of his back, flung the desperate commissar through the dark opening. As he fell, twisting and turning like an abandoned corpse, he caught brief, woozy glimpses of his three assassins – now standing around the hole, spewing gouts of optimistic shot after him.

Eventually his assassins faded – as did the boom of their target practice as the range became untenable. The darkness of the enormous warehouse swallowed him and Krieg waited the flailing eternity it took to reach solid ground and the end of his life.

His landing came sooner than he could have anticipated and to his utter astonishment, he bounced.

The depository housed a small mountain of some kind of green crop – a fleshy pod, no doubt some kind of off-world foodstuff harvested on a distant agri-world, imported to feed the army of immigrant workers that kept Illium a productive powerhouse. Krieg’s bounce soon turned into a floundering tumble that picked up speed as he rolled down the side of the pod mega-mound. Many of the vegetative cases split and cracked under the commissar’s rough treatment and by the time Krieg actually hit the dirt of the warehouse floor, he was thoroughly splattered with the pods’ thick, jaundiced discharge.

He lay there for a moment in an unceremonious heap, pain coursing through his very being. Sitting slowly upright in the dust, surrounded by smashed pod cases, the cadet-commissar unbuckled his greatcoat and allowed the heavy leather to fall to the ground – heavier than usual due to the extra flak plates Krieg had instructed Golliant to sew into the garment. Udeskee’s advice had been warranted after all. He still felt like four ogryns had gone to work on him with iron bars and his uniform was torn and bloody where pellets had actually found their mark.

Probing his clothing at the shoulder, where the worst of the damage seemed to have been done, Krieg’s eye caught movement on the floor beside him. Something was moving inside one of the pods. Curious and appalled, the commissar slipped a slim blade from out of a sheath in his boot. He’d had the blade since basic training on Galtinore: it was his Legionnaire’s bayonet and it went everywhere with him. Poking the knife inside the split and twisting the blade, Krieg cracked open the pod. A small creature rolled out, enveloped in a stringy juice. Krieg retracted his hand immediately. The thing was clearly alien in origin and must have violated a thousand different quarantine and importation by-laws just by lying there. It was roughly bipedal and had beady red eyes and a tough, leathery green hide. Its strange body was largely dominated by its man-trap maw, however, and as the docile horror yawned, it showed off its immature dagger-like fangs.

Krieg had seen these things before. Any soldier that fought orks and their foetid kind had. They had an equally repulsive name that the commissar could not recall, even staring at the nasty thing. To his knowledge the horrors went everywhere with the monstrous green degenerates. In turn it was widely believed that greenskin reproduction had a hierarchical biology relying heavily on spores and the pods that grew from them. Life in the 123rd Pontificals had been rarely dull: inquisitors had unhealthy interests. At that moment, Krieg reasoned, he was sitting amongst a giga-warehouse of greenskin pods, harvested and stored in an Adeptus Mechanicus facility at the heart of the Illian capital for some nefarious purpose.

Getting stiffly to his knees and then with even more care and forethought, his feet, Krieg pulled his flak-reinforced coat back on and fished around in the webbing for an arc lamp. Clutching the bayonet in one hand – his only remaining weapon – and snapping the torch to life he pierced the vast darkness of the depository searching for an exit. He found something else entirely.

Krieg gave a violent start as the arc beam cut through several dark figures in the dusty twilight. His bayonet came up, but the figures failed to respond. Every bone in his body wanted to turn back but with the warehouse wall to wall with the pods that had saved his life in the other direction, there was little choice but to creep forward.

Hugging the deeper shadow of the depository wall, the commissar sidled along, both knife and torch extended towards the statuesque figures. They could almost be sculptures but for the rise and fall of their barrel-chests and the epileptic flutter of their armoured eyelids. Hundreds and hundreds of ork savages: adorned with scraps of salvaged flak mail, spikes, and dripping with all manner of brute weaponry. They stood as if on parade – although Krieg realised that the comparison was ridiculous, second only to the fact that he was actually witnessing such antithetical behaviour – swaying slightly, a few metres equidistant from one another in the cavernous space of the depository.

The cadet dared not intentionally interact with the small army of hulking, sadistic man-eaters, but his lamplight and the scrape of his footfalls did little to disturb them. The tightness in his chest begged him to bolt for it but Krieg could not bring himself to do so – feeling as though one does in the presence of a rabid dog. He wanted to run but knew that he shouldn’t. His calm, measured steps took all the longer to take, however and gave him further opportunity to make observations as he shuffled along the warehouse wall. The further he got the stranger circumstances became.

Some of the creatures drooled from their snaggle-tusked jaws as they stood in their trance-like stupor. Instead of glooping to the ground, though, the slobber dribbled upwards, finally dashing the depository roof above.

Orks on Illium was one thing; the same orks entranced in a warehouse was already one step beyond, but now with the laws of physics failing to apply, Krieg was ready to start questioning his own sanity. Had one of those shotgun blasts taken his head off: was he dead?

That wasn’t all. Strange orbs of light proceeded to glide above and around the stationary monsters and the air crackled between them, resulting in the occasional blue spark leaping from one alien to another.

No one could pretend to know very much about the minds of orks, but Krieg had been told that greenskins generated a psychic field that individually accounted for their technological mastery and under communal circumstances could create unnatural social and physical effects. Krieg couldn’t tell whether or not he was witnessing some of this bizarre phenomenon at that moment, but he did know that he’d never seen orks act this way before and he’d met them on the field of battle both as a Legionnaire and a Pontifical.

The worst moments were in fact those closest to the door. He could imagine reaching the postern gate and the barbaric horde coming back to their brutal senses. Forcing the lock quietly with the flat of his blade, Krieg stepped out into the deserted avenue and closed the door steadily behind him. Resting his back against it he slid to the dirt, the nervous tension evaporating from his body with such collective force that the relief made him feel light-headed and weak. Sitting in the road he didn’t know what scared him more: the fact that the convoy had left him behind in enemy-held territory or the possibility that each of the gargantuan storehouses that surrounded him and the mighty cathedra beyond held a sizeable warband of battle-seasoned greenskins.

Getting to his feet Krieg started to jog in the direction of the Mortis Maximus. Deleval’s fast moving column would have to rendezvous with Mortensen’s Redemption Corps in order to move out the Titan crew and if he could move fast enough, that was Krieg’s best bet. Either way, the commissar had to reach a vox-link: the 364th Volscian Shadow Brigade were being drawn into an insidious trap of monumental proportions and that warehouse was a target begging for an Imperial air strike. He could only hope that he’d make it in time.

IX

Vertigo soared above the street-level maelstrom. For the past half an hour Rosenkrantz had been doing her best to keep the Spectre firmly in the air, where it belonged, rather than down in the Illian melting pot where the aircraft seemed to want to take her. Chief Nauls had reported smoke trailing from the tail and the pilot herself had detected vibration in the pedals. Vertigo seemed to be holding her own, however, and while the Spectre seemed content to remain airborne, Rosenkrantz was obliged to remain on station above the rendezvous.

The evacuation point was actually a small landing strip west of Artellus. It had presumably been used for important personages and senior adepts, visiting the great cathedra. Burnt-out wrecks of lighters, shuttles and the occasional Aquila lander littered the runway but there was enough room to put down the Spectres, their bay doors gaping open and ready to take on board the returning convoy vehicles. Blazer Four, Five and Six buzzed around the evacuation point, occasionally ripping into surrounding buildings with their multi-lasers as pockets of encroaching insurgents were identified. By and large the reconnaissance data had been good and the rendezvous was secure.

Nauls broke through on the vox: he had more news for her.

‘Chief?’

‘Skip, we’re seeing some unusual enemy movement to the south-east. Might want to check it out.’

‘What do you mean, unusual?’ Captain Rask broke in.

‘Doesn’t look like mob activity,’ the crew chief drawled. ‘They, well, sir, they look like troops and manoeuvres to me.’

Rosenkrantz leaned the Spectre into a half-turn. Rask checked his strategic data-slates while Sass pushed in past Benedict to get a better look through the canopy.

‘He’s right: they’re in formations,’ the adjutant confirmed.

‘It’s probably the Volscians,’ Rask countered, but his data-slates weren’t providing much in the way of evidence for that.

‘There’s no way they made progress like that.’

‘Maybe there was less resistance than anticipated,’ the captain hypothesised.

‘What, with the flak we’ve been catching?’ Sass put to him. ‘No way.’

Rask tried to get a better view for himself.

‘Give me a fly-by,’ the captain finally directed.

‘Are you out of your mind?’ was the only response the pilot could conjure.

‘If those are enemy troops down there, the major will need to know.’

Sass nodded. ‘They could cut off the convoy; crush the hold points.’

Rosenkrantz shook her helmet from side to side. ‘Benedict, I’m going to need more starboard thrust to offset the deviation.’

‘Affirmative,’ Benedict complied, ‘Recalibrating for a high speed pass.’

Plunging nose first towards the urban anarchy she’d been so eager to avoid, Rosenkrantz pushed Vertigo as much as she dared. The distant jigsaw puzzle of alleys and freightways came up fast and she levelled the Spectre out at a rooftop streak, rocking to starboard and port to avoid various antennae and watchtowers. Ground to air small arms fire followed in their superheated wake, too sluggish to acquire the aircraft at such thunderbolt speeds.

Banking slightly to give the best view of the industrial metropolis below, Rosenkrantz and the corpsman watched as empty avenues turned to rivers of green. Heavily-armed ork warriors, all muscle, spikes and jumbo weaponry, were bounding down the streets. Bikes and buggies belching oily smoke and noise weaved in and out of the charging throng, tearing up the sand freightways with spiked tyres and suicidal acceleration. Capillary columns of troops stomped out of surrounding warehouses and stores, bolstering the already thick channels of alien ferocity converging on the cathedra.

Rosenkrantz brought the Spectre up off the deck and back into the open sky. She turned to face Rask.

‘Take us back,’ he told her simply. ‘Benedict, patch me through the major. Now.’

X

As a legionnaire Krieg had done plenty of running; the physical standards required to join an Inquisitorial storm-trooper detachment were tougher still. As a young officer he’d increasingly gotten used to giving orders, rather than the physical reality of actually carrying them out. As an Imperial commissar he’d expected to do even less. It should have been unsurprising, therefore, that his body took to the rude awakening of a long distance slog with less enthusiasm than expected.

Unarmed and abandoned, all the cadet-commissar had was his legs: two lifeless appendages sending constant and insistent updates to his brain amounting to little more than biological begging. The numb burn of each thigh and calf was unbearable and sent shockwaves of pain with each stumbling footfall through his already bruised and blasted torso. His lungs felt shallow and his reinforced greatcoat, now more in demand than ever amongst the chasing las-fire pitched at his racing form, felt like he was dragging a Chimera behind him.

The cathedra grew and the booming roar of the Valkyries hovering somewhere overhead became clearer. The pulse-snap of laser bolts sang in the air as Krieg stomp-jogged his exhausted carcass under the sights of Second Platoon manning the southern rooftop hold point. They weren’t firing, which occurred to Krieg’s adrenaline-addled brain as a good thing. It would simply be embarrassing to have been shot by his own troops twice in one day.

The convoy formed a ragged line in front of the colossal feet of the mighty Mortis Maximus, the combination of Warlord Titan and the Adeptus Mechanicus cathedra blotting out the sun. The deep shadow stung the blistering, sweaty skin of his face with sudden coolness. A mixture of storm-troopers and Fourth Platoon crouched in between the vehicles, weapons ready for any rebels that slipped through the Shadow Brigade’s elevated hold points. Gunners swung their assault cannons round over the heads of a cluster of soldiers in discussion half way down the column.

Krieg’s staggering attempt at a run collapsed into an unsteady walk as he leaned against the open back door of the rearguard Centaur, trying to find his breath. A storm-trooper in a headband with a bootless, bandaged foot gave him a curious look. A stretcher was loaded into the back alongside him bearing a more composed-looking Opech. The sniper had clearly received some much needed morphia and he gave Krieg a warm glance. The cadet-commissar patted the sniper’s leg lightly, but didn’t have the air for any kind of further conversation and stumbled on down the column. His bedraggled appearance drew further surprised looks from the convoy sentries and the huddle of Guardsmen simply fell silent upon his arrival: some with surprise, some with suspicion.

Corporal Vedette managed one of her crisp Mordian salutes, whilst the man-mountain Preed simply nodded to himself grimly. The three sergeants, Bronstead, Minghella and the dagger-faced Conklin began to break away: most notably the master sergeant and the bull-necked Bronstead, who were drifting towards Steel Sanctuary. By coincidence this was exactly where the ragged commissar was going.

Krieg tore the rear door open, revealing a small congregation of Guardsmen inside. Deleval was seated next to the driver, his face fast becoming a nest of infuriated creases. Snyder and Goinz rested up front, passing a canteen between themselves and the lieutenant and lighting up lho-sticks. Turkle sat with his back to the door and the barrel of his pump action aimed lazily across one knee at Golliant and Sarakota, who had been disarmed, and were seated on the other side of the Centaur.

The commissar yanked his hellpistol from where it sat snugly in Turkle’s holster, the power pack still attached to the henchman’s belt. Krieg put the muzzle straight to the back of the hiver’s skull, just behind the ear.

‘When you’ve got the shot, you better take it,’ Krieg hissed and squeezed the trigger. The superheated blast filled the troop compartment and sent brains and fragments of skull across the stupefied Snyder and a still grinning Goinz. ‘Good advice,’ the commissar told them and leaned in across Turkle’s headless corpse for his next shot.

Deleval leaned away, despite the fact that the pistol had clearly moved to Snyder and Goinz.

‘Don’t do it,’ Bronstead growled, his hand hovering over his own laspistol, but Vedette reached out for his wrist.

‘He’s an Imperial commissar,’ she reminded the Volscian sergeant.

‘A commissar’s word is law,’ Preed agreed unhappily.

‘He ain’t no commissar, yet,’ Bronstead reminded them, shrugging the Mordian off, and put his hand on the holstered laspistol.

Krieg swapped hands and extended his right fist towards the bridling hive sergeant: Udeskee’s signet ring glittered in the dull light. ‘These men have been found wanting,’ he announced darkly.

‘It’s a lot worse than that,’ a voice cut across the tense air. Major Mortensen stood behind them. One hand covered three ugly gashes that had opened up his carapace body armour at the belly and made the front of his fatigues sodden and slick with blood. ‘Commissar Krieg here holds the life of every man committed to this operation, wanting or not, in that righteous fist.’

Vedette ran to the major’s side, swiftly followed by Minghella. The commissar’s pistol wavered.

‘You were right, Krieg,’ Mortensen continued. ‘I was wrong. It’s a cult. The rebels have alien allies. We’ve stirred up a stingwings’ nest here and sprung a trap that was waiting for the main body pacification force. If we don’t go now, we’re all dead. So make up your mind. Shoot them. Don’t shoot them. Either way, I have to get my men off this dirtball.’

Precious seconds came and went.

Krieg finally let the fatigue take him and lowered the hellpistol.

Mortensen immediately began to bark orders: ‘Kynt, get back to Captain Rask. Have the Vectors come down to street level and have Second Platoon extracted from the rooftops. It’s risky, but we don’t have the time or space for anything else. As soon as they’re loaded, send them across to the evacuation point with Blazer One and Three. We can’t afford another bird to come down in this mess.’ He turned to find a bitter Bronstead standing nearby. ‘Likewise, sergeant,’ Mortensen added with an edge and the fuming Volscian stomped away.

‘Titan crew loaded on the convoy. No losses,’ Vedette informed him crisply as Minghella tried to examine the major’s wound. ‘Teague?’

Mortensen shook his head.

Lieutenant Deleval had climbed out of his vehicle and approached the pair. Turkle’s blood still dripped from his flak jacket. He flicked his head at Krieg.

‘You gonna let that slide?’ Deleval challenged: soldier to soldier, eyes aflame.

Mortensen cast a glance over the bedraggled, scatter-shot ridden cadet. He ignored Deleval and directed his orders at Vedette.

‘Have the troopers climb into the Centaurs with Fourth Platoon.’

‘They’re already carrying the Titan crew and Thunder’s boys,’ the Shadow Brigade officer snarled.

‘Our men could walk out and provide security for the vehicles,’ Vedette offered. Again, the major shook his head. He had a soft spot for Vedette, probably more than he cared to admit: Conklin’s replacement-in-waiting.

‘Throne’s balls, I don’t care how cramped it is – get them in. Any man left behind is a dead man. Trust me.’

The Mordian shot off without further question to organise the sentries, followed by Preed and finally Deleval, who glowered at Mortensen and then pushed past Krieg’s battered shoulder. The commissar didn’t have the energy to push back and simply let the hiver bulldoze his way through.

‘You can do that in transit,’ the major told Minghella irritably. The medic was already pulling counterseptic spray from his medicae satchel and fussing with the shredded carapace. Uncle helped Mortensen to the rear of the forward Centaur, with Krieg reattaching the hellpistol’s power pack to his belt and coming up behind.

‘Zane, who the hell are we running from?’ Minghella asked, ignoring Mortensen’s request and attempting to stifle the major’s bleeding.

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,’ Mortensen answered with clear confidence.

‘I believe I would,’ Krieg muttered moodily to himself.

XI

It was breathtaking to watch from the sky. Rosenkrantz couldn’t imagine the pure unadulterated madness it would be on the ground. Back on station, high above the airstrip, Vertigo had the best seats in the house. Rask and Sass sat at the rear of the cockpit, their hearts in their throats as they all watched the Redemption Corps convoy hurtle up the winding freightways, throwing up thick plumes of fine sand and dust behind them.

Every few moments the captain would give another solemn navigational instruction, taking the vehicles one block further out of reach. Like a slippery eel narrowly escaping the closing jaws of some waterborne super predator, the column weaved left and right before accelerating explosively up the straights and away from adjoining streets and alleyways already engulfed by the closing swarm of green carnage.

Closer to the airstrip, the narrow lanes fed into a long stretch of broad freightway, allowing the Shadow Brigade drivers to prove their worth. The open road allowed the super-charged Centaurs the space to make some ground on the storming hordes, the degenerate savages hailing a blizzard of hot lead after them. The ork buggies were less easy to outrun, sharing as they did the same advantages as the fire support vehicles and their drivers on the long stretch up to the airstrip.

The Volscian drivers did their best: ramming scrapheap buggies into the walls of surrounding storage facilities and pulverising dare-devil riders and their bikes under track. The gunners, conversely, did their worst – spraying the gaining greenskin wagons with a torrent of unrelenting fire from their pintle-mounted assault cannons. The patchwork trucks would often simply erupt into flames and roll, causing other fast moving vehicles to smash into them and join the inferno. Looted Mechanicus tractors and carriers were more resilient, however, soaking up the damage with their superior armour, and it was these and a few of the nimbler speed-freak bikers that stayed with the convoy all the way to the airstrip.

Rask had a surprise for them.

Hugging the deck, Blazer Five and Six skirted the dirt track freightway on a collision course for the convoy, with rocket pods armed.

‘Take us down,’ the captain ordered. ‘And open the bay door. This is going to be a touchdown pick-up.’ Below, the other Spectres waited in similar configuration, their engines idling them a few metres off the rockcrete of the airstrip and their doors open and ready to swallow one of the approaching Centaurs.

Rask turned to Vertigo’s co-pilot: ‘Benedict, contact Lieutenant Commander Waldemar and transmit our coordinates. Extend our compliments and inform him we’ll be with him shortly. Give the order for the Vectors and remaining Blazers to scramble and begin making their approach.’

‘Affirmative, captain.’

Rosenkrantz grunted. She could hardly have expected Mortensen to have been so cordial.

Like a flock of spooked birds the Valkyries and Vultures took off from the airstrip as the Vertigo descended. Only Blazer Five and Six remained, their rocket run on the convoy almost complete. Lifting a further few metres above the ground, the sleek gunships allowed the Centaur carriers to surge beneath them before propelling rocket after rocket into the oncoming ork vehicles. Some of the greenskin drivers had the common sense to brake but many simply blasted on, sure that they could clear the raging ball of pure annihilation the road ahead had become. As the Blazers vanished in the haze bank of dust and swarthy smoke, intent on turning for another run from the rear, the convoy fragmented, each vehicle rocketing across the airstrip for their designated Spectre carrier.

Hitting the ramps at perilous speeds, the Centaurs rolled inside, reversing their tracks and skidding to a full stop. With ramps closing and their freight intact the Spectres blasted skyward, intent on catching the comparatively sprightly Vectors.

Rosenkrantz felt the quake of extra weight in Vertigo’s swollen belly as Mortensen’s Centaur mounted the ramp.

‘They’re in, skipper. Ramp closing,’ Chief Nauls came over the vox.

‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ Rosenkrantz said and pulled back on the stick.

Vertigo gave a violent shudder before lurching and dropping back to the deck. Rosenkrantz was thrown forward in her seat before being suddenly wrenched back. The cockpit went wild again with klaxons and runescreens mounting an assault on the senses.

‘What is it?’ Rask yelled above the clamour. ‘Are we hit?’

‘Is it the damage from earlier?’ Sass joined in.

Rosenkrantz was finding it difficult enough finding the internal vox-switch in all the cacophony.

‘Chief? Chief! I need a damage report.’ Nobody answered. Running her fingers across a series of glyph studs the pilot brought the instrumentation back under control.

‘Captain, this may not be the time,’ Benedict piped up, ‘but I’ve lost vox contact with Blazer Five and Six.’

Rask turned from Benedict to Rosenkrantz and then back to Benedict.

‘Do you still have them on the scope?’ the flight lieutenant asked, before trying the bay vox once again.

‘Negative,’ said Benedict.

‘I think I might know why,’ Sass announced to the cockpit, snatching a pair of magnoculars from the rack and pointing a finger over his captain’s shoulder. A dirty, menacing shadow flashed up against the dust and smoke screen churned up by the convoy. Rosenkrantz took the shape for one of the Vultures at first, but as it got simultaneously closer and larger it became apparent that they were not looking at an Imperial aircraft. The smoke bank began to drift, increasingly whipped up by the force of the emerging craft, and the shape assumed the definite outline of a silhouette before puncturing the cloud with lance-like antennae and telescopic barrels.

‘We got problems,’ Rosenkrantz said flatly.

Mortensen suddenly appeared bare-chested on the cockpit companionway, his belly freshly bandaged and dressed. ‘Are we hit?’ he called imperiously as he threw on a khaki vest.

‘We’re about to be,’ his adjutant informed him. Mortensen took in the monster-copter erupting from the dust cloud. The bastardised aircraft had a hugely fat hull, from the underside of which sprouted the multitude of different sized tyres, tracks and landing gears required to get the beast up off the ground. Two great dragonfly-style wings extended from each side, supported by a network of mismatched cables. The wings formed a cross from the front and bowed under the weight of various bombs, missiles and rockets mounted on their underside.

The monster bristled with heavy guns and large-bore cannon and was crawling with greenskin gunners. Worst of all, along the colossal span of the Deffkopta’s four rotor blades ran high speed, serrated, chain blades: as well as keeping the monster in the air the blades could be used to shear an inferior aircraft in two. And Vertigo was an inferior aircraft.

‘We got problems,’ Rosenkrantz repeated to herself, stunned by the brute spectacle of the ork super-gunship. ‘Chief, talk to me!’ she bellowed once more.

‘Tail’s on fire!’ the chief suddenly bawled back. ‘So we’re kind of busy down here. Ramp opening.’

‘Sass, why’d we lose thrust?’ Rosenkrantz was all out and didn’t have time to confer with the cognition banks. She figured she could lose little by consulting the adjutant’s notoriously encyclopaedic brain.

‘Depending on where it’s spreading – an internal fire could short all kind of systems,’ the adjutant replied.

Rosenkrantz’s eyes widened as the huge deffkopta skimmed the depository rooftops, running down on them. As its killer rotor blades cleared the surrounding dust and smoke the green tsunami of ork ground troops reappeared. They washed through the streets underneath the nightmare aircraft and flooded the freightway, scudding towards the airfield with blades and bastardised weaponry drawn.

Rosenkrantz made her decision: ‘Chief, get inside and close the ramp. I don’t have time to explain.’

‘What about the fire?’ Sass interjected.

‘Benedict, fire the thrusters.’

‘The fire?’ Sass reiterated, allowing moderate alarm to creep into his voice.

The co-pilot did as he was ordered. The fuselage bucked: the quad of engines choked.

‘Again.’

‘What if the thrusters short on us in flight?’ the major’s adjutant put to her with increasing hysteria.

‘We crash and die?’ Mortensen hazarded from the companionway.

Rask looked to the major for orders. ‘We really gonna do this?’

‘It’s her bird,’ Mortensen replied, holding on to both sides of the cockpit egress. ‘She knows what she’s doing.’

Geysers of dirt and rockcrete sprang up before the Spectre as the deffkopta unleashed its motley arsenal of forward firing cannons and chain guns. Vertigo’s thrusters choked once more before indulging in an unanticipated last moment rally. The quad of engines cycled for a split second before reassuming its customary high-pitched roar.

Fighting the instinct to pull straight up with her reinstated power, Rosenkrantz rolled the bird starboard out of the path of destruction that cut through her landing zone like an angry elemental force. It was just as well, as the Spectre would have almost certainly climbed into the umbrella-like reach of the deffkopta’s buzzsaw rotors. Automatic fire danced across the canopy and hull as greenskin blister nests along the length of the enemy aircraft’s armoured flanks let rip with their own assortment of pintle-mounted weaponry. Sparks flew in the cockpit and something died in the instrumentation.

‘Just lost comms and scanners,’ Benedict informed her helpfully.

The doom-laden shadow of the beast passed overhead, giving the flight lieutenant time to retract landing gears that were fast becoming tangled in the blasted shell of an Arvus lighter.

‘Can we return fire?’ the major enquired as he took in the full horror of the bloated, greenskin gunship.

‘Ordnance spent,’ Rosenkrantz managed, trying to shrug off the twisted wreck. ‘We have the four heavy bolters on the side doors and a cannon on the nose, neither of which is going to put the slightest dent in that thing.’

Putting everything she had into forward thrust, the Jopallian pilot took Vertigo off the deck and blasted back towards Corpora Mons, a ripple of ground small-arms fire following in her wake.

Rask put his cheek to the canopy armaplas in an attempt to spot the deffkopta. ‘It’s back on our tail,’ he told the pilot. The graceless piece of scrap had had to waste time on a lumbering, ungainly turn, but now it was back – the unbelievable span of those deadly rotors equipping the helicopter with blistering acceleration.

A distribution complex below the Vertigo vaporised as a ragged stream of rockets and missiles seared past the Spectre and indiscriminately carpet-bombed the stretch of vat labs and slave mills rolling swiftly beneath their hull. Rosenkrantz fitfully nudged her stick this way and that, evading the shower of greenskin ordnance. The fact was that there was only a limited amount that she could do. Vertigo wasn’t built for manoeuvrability like her waspish gunship cousins. Heavily-laden with a personnel carrier secured in her belly, she wasn’t exactly going to be doing three hundred and sixty degree rolls either.

For a heart-stopping moment every soul in the cockpit thought that the thrusters had died. This was largely because they had, but this time it was the flight lieutenant’s doing. The airbrakes cut deeply into Vertigo’s vaulting run and the Spectre slowed, allowing a wire-guided death dealer to pass over their heads. It touched down on the ornate roof of a Genetor parliament building, vaulting a curtain of broiling flame skyward. Rosenkrantz had little choice but to punch through and re-engaged the thruster quad, hammering into the explosive backwash.

As the Spectre came through the other side, Rosenkrantz mused, ‘Well, if we weren’t on fire before – we are now.’

‘Shouldn’t we be heading for Deliverance?’ Sass asked fearfully, his bleached knuckles wrapped around his flight harness. Rosenkrantz was growing weary of the corporal’s questions, which she increasingly found difficult to ignore.

‘We’d never make it,’ Mortensen answered for her. ‘The taller buildings around the cathedra and the narrower avenues will work to our advantage.’

Of course he was right. Rosenkrantz rolled the aircraft over as much as she dared to allow clearance before diving down between the Gothic splendour of high-rise bethels and tabernacular archways. The deff-kopta was forced to decrease speed and rise: its murderous rotor blades no match for the constricted airspace and busy architecture of the Mechanicus religious district.

‘Do you see it?’ Rask called, his eyeballs once again at the reinforced plas. She didn’t, but kept up the scorching speed along the monument-strewn boulevards, banking left and right high above the twinkling carpet of gunfire and green bodies until she found herself alongside the chasmal, gargoyle-encrusted walls of the Artellus Cathedra itself. She allowed the velocity to fall off until the Spectre found itself hovering alongside the grandiose detail of a vast, circular stained-glass window. The window depicted a hololithic representation of the Sixteen Universal Laws of Adeptus Mechanicus endeavour at work.

‘Perfect,’ Sass grumbled. ‘Right back where we started.’

As the aircraft gently twirled in the greater space of the plaza avenue, all eyes were on the two open ends of the canyon boulevard where they terminated at the far reaches of the cathedra super-structure. These were conceivably large enough to accommodate the monster aircraft and Rosenkrantz’s finger rested against the trigger-thrust.

‘Maybe we lost them?’ the major said, his usually grating tone unnecessarily hushed.

As the nose cone rolled round once more to the spectacular window, a niggling doubt appeared like a half-glimpsed phantom in the background of Rosenkrantz’s already preoccupied thoughts. She felt her eyes climb skyward. She peered directly up through the Spectre canopy.

There it was.

The deep, black outline of the junker behemoth was holding still about a hundred metres above the surrounding Corpora rooftops. It was partially obscured by the fast growing shadow of a fat, cigar-shaped object falling rapidly towards the Spectre.

The words, ‘No, no, no, no,’ passed the pilot’s clenched teeth, drawing further faces skyward.

‘Shoot it out!’ Mortensen yelled.

Rosenkrantz jerked back on the stick, unleashing the autocannon on the immaculate stained glass. The window imploded, the priceless relic blasted apart, leaving a gale-tormented hole. Dipping the nose and lifting the tail, Rosenkrantz glided the carrier in carefully through the improvised aperture. It was close: she felt the slipstream of the bombshell tug on the back of the Spectre as it fell past the shattered window.

There was a stomach-churning rumble, then a blast wave of furious energy; the wall of mighty Artellus visibly quivered. The gloom of the cathedra evaporated as a deluge of raging flame poured inside and washed up the walls of the building from the armageddon outside. A gust of pure explosive force pushed Vertigo up further towards the vaulted roof as a rainbow of shards cascaded down around them from other giant stained-glass windows put in by the blast.

The Spectre idled at minimum thrust in the confined roofspace of the cathedra, amongst the cord pulls hanging from the vertiginous heights of the cathedra bell tower like vines in a jungle treetop. The cockpit was deathly silent. Rosenkrantz clutched her stick, flicking her nail back and forth over the nose cannon’s safety stud in a futile act of mock aggression.

The pilot and the storm-troopers watched as a descending shadow spiralled around the cathedra exterior, blacking out the holes left by the stained-glass. Fortunately the openings were not large enough to admit the deffkopta, but they would suffice for the almost solid stream of greenskin lead pouring in from the aircraft’s heavy weaponry.

It was only a matter of time before they acquired the Vertigo.

‘What I wouldn’t give for a Hunter-Killer right now…’ Rosenkrantz spat.

XII

And that gave the major an idea.

Leaning over the stolid Benedict, Mortensen reclaimed his gift to the co-pilot earlier that day: the souvenir rocket launcher he’d taken from the mechhead that had dropped Blazer Two in the plaza.

It was the kind of cheap military hardware mass-produced on a hundred different forge worlds for use by PDF and conscript Guard troops. The single shot tube was dented and smeared with dry blood and while hardly a veteran’s choice, it might be the kind of equaliser Mortensen was looking for.

‘Lower the ramp,’ he snarled, throwing the weapon’s sling strap over his head and across one shoulder. His request was met by with a flurry of objections but by that time the major was already at the bottom of the companionway. It was their only real chance, anyhow.

The troop bay was hushed. The battle-scarred Centaur rocked in its restraints; the Navy gun crew harnessed themselves, fearing the worst, hoping for a miracle. It was out of their hands and in the bloody, sweaty palms of the major.

Commissar Krieg was lowering the ramp, his ragged greatcoat molested further by the breeze. He pulled down his cap and gave the Gomorrian major snake eyes.

‘Who are you today, Mortensen: storm-trooper or saviour?’ the cadet-commissar put to him as the ramp juddered down.

‘I don’t follow you,’ the major called back across the turbulence.

‘Do you believe you can save this ship? Save us?’ Krieg asked, handing the storm-trooper his black leather gloves.

‘Does it matter?’ he returned, pulling them on.

‘To me it does.’

‘Well, Commissar Krieg,’ the grizzled major said as he mounted the ramp. ‘I guess you’ll never know, will you?’

Mortensen looked out across the vast depth of open space below the Spectre; the eternity of distance he would plummet before hitting the mosaic, marble floor at the very bottom of the cathedra where a garrison of Trepkos’s tech-guard had already lost their lives in the defence of the cathedra. He turned back to the intense young officer: ‘But I suppose you’d better hope I can and that I will.’

With that he tore off the ramp and sailed across the emptiness. Snatching at the bell cords, the slick gloves slid at first, burning through the leather and taking the skin from his palms, until the major’s pulverising grip brought him to a dangling swing. The boom of the Mechanicus bells reverberated around the roofspace with deafening power. The air trembled around him as each movement on the cord brought new jarring combinations of chimes.

Then began the agony of the rapid hand over hand climb which even Mortensen felt: the rancid burn of raw muscle deep within his arms. At one moment he was sure he was going to fall. The greenskin war machine routinely blasted a storm of shot and shell through the open windows, which inevitably plucked at the bell pulls, shredding cord and severing random strands above him. A bolt round yanked on his line cutting the material in half, but somehow the cord continued to hold his weight.

With little or nothing left in his arms the major pulled himself up past the titanic bell and in through the bell tower balustrade. The breathtaking view of an industrial metropolis in rebellion and smoke-streaming ruin would be enough to convince most men that they had reached the summit of the cathedra. The manned but silent plasma silos that had claimed White Thunder still towered above the major, however. That didn’t matter to Mortensen.

Carefully climbing down the extravagant Gothic architecture of the cathedra, Mortensen slipped the rocket launcher off his back and primed the weapon. Below he could hear the shearing blades of the deffkopta’s rotor as the hulking aircraft came round for another pass on the remaining machina opus-emblazoned window. As it came into view, the Gomorrian storm-trooper could see orks and their runts swarming over the thing, reloading spent, swollen cannons and cocking gatling-style heavy weaponry. Vertigo could only have mere seconds left.

Mortensen trained the tube’s simple sights on the grotesque mechanism at the heart of the deffkopta’s killer rotor blades. He aimed and he fired.

With a whoosh and a kick the krak missile was away, streaking for the enemy aircraft. Moments later the rotor blades were in disarray, chopping into the air with jolting irregularity as the warhead split the mechanism asunder. There was a brief flash and a shower of warped frag.

The monster began to lose altitude almost immediately, gravity dragging its heavy metal bulk towards the planet’s surface. A rotor blade – still buzzing away with serrated lethality – struck the cathedra wall and smashed, throwing wicked shards of razor-sharp metal in all directions. It was all over for the deffkopta from that point on as the behemoth bounced between the walls of Artellus and the surrounding buildings, descending like some fallen meteorite, tail over canopy in chaotic confusion, explosive disintegration and carnage.

Mortensen hawked and spat a gob of stringy, blood-threaded saliva after the doomed machine. Tossing the rocket tube too, his hand wandered down to his vest, where new blood had broken through Minghella’s field stitches with the exertion of the climb. He climbed down on the precipice of the cathedra roof and plucked the blood-soaked stub of a cigar from his fatigues’ pocket.

Lighting it, the major sat and watched the topless towers of Illium burn.