CHAPTER SIX

Skin Deep

I

Crake’s World, Lesser Nox, UB-26, Autega, Endymion Prime, Byssta… Deathworlds every one, each a ball of unprecedented lethality and doom. And either as a Galtinore Legionnaire or as Pontifical, Koulick Krieg had visited and survived them all. It was, however, this unknown hintermoon, this perennially ignored, backwater planetoid that had finally done for him.

Rappelling in from Purity Control a few kilometres from the coordinates Santhonax had given him, Krieg’s plan was to locate the storm-troopers and observe the mission. He would then wait for Mortensen to damn himself with anything that might be considered cultish practice – as the Canoness Regular would have it – and administer Imperial justice.

That was before Ishtar’s glass forest had sliced him up good and proper. This might have been tolerable if it weren’t for the colossal detours he had had to make to avoid the warren of steamy, frothing channels and flood basins that spread out across the crystal rainforest like a cryogenic delta. Throwing himself down flat on a sandy patch of earth, the cadet-commissar covered his head with his hands. Every few minutes the forest lit up in an electric power storm, with arc flashes jumping this way and that, striking and forking between the crystalline trunks and searing the surrounding air. Like synapse sparks between the cells in a brain, the chain reactions carried for kilometres across the deathworld forest and the thought was always the same: kill Koulick Krieg.

Suddenly everything went quiet and the furious display faded. Bringing his head out from his arms the commissar peered around the forest. There was no time for catching breath or congratulating himself on surviving electrocution yet again. It was only a matter of minutes before the charges building in the silicon shrubbery reached critical mass and unleashed their firestorm fury again. Pushing himself up and out of the fine sand, Krieg made a bolt for it.

Swinging his Ryza-pattern plasma gun about him like a machete, Krieg battered aside the flinty branches of the strange alien foliage that choked the space between the trees. The glass leaves shattered about him as he pushed himself from one translucent trunk to another to retain momentum. The sea of razor blade edges through which he was wading was taking its toll. Upon being informed that he was being dropped on a deathworld, Krieg had decided to abandon his heavy greatcoat in favour of a Pontifical flak jacket, goggles and commissar’s cap. He’d had the coat shipped back to Deliverance with his hellpistol. The jacket was offering next to no protection from his hostile environment, however. With foliage routinely nicking and slicing open his flesh at every opportunity, his vest and undergarments felt sodden with sweat and blood.

Pain suddenly flashed up one leg as his boot unexpectedly plunged through a sinkhole. He screamed out instinctively and then threw himself down into a clumsy roll: this meant falling through more of the punishing silicon vegetation as stalks and leaves slashed clean through the flak on his back and cut open his flesh with the smoothness of a scalpel. All he could think about was his foot, however, that at first had flared with stabbing cold pain, but now felt like it was submerged in boiling oil. Slapping his belt for his Galtinore bayonet, Krieg slipped the blade down past the frosted buckles and laces of his boot and slashed them open. With his other foot he kicked off the steaming boot. It flew through the air and hit the trunk of a nearby tree, the reinforced leather of the toe and the sole shattering on impact.

Clutching his frostbitten foot, Krieg let out another unintentional roar of pain and frustration. Professional soldiery swiftly took over and, realising that his cries of pain might have been heard, attracting some as yet unseen deathworld predator, Krieg made the uncomfortable glass-crunch scramble required to lay his hands back on the plasma gun.

Nothing came, however, and all Krieg could hear was the hum of his weapon’s cell-flask. Sitting there with his seething flesh, the cadet-commissar suddenly became aware of a change in his surroundings: colours and shapes that seemed unnatural, if such a thing were possible on this wholly alien world.

He was sitting underneath a makeshift walkway, set on stilts to provide significant ground clearance. It was constructed from rough planks of irregular crystal, seemingly smashed from the thick trunks of the surrounding trees. This made a surprisingly robust structure, considering the fragility of the materials.

Limping carefully underneath the crude trail and following its crookedly winding path, Krieg became aware of great, rough-hewn obelisks sunk into the ground at increasingly regular intervals. The concentration of trees and the swarm of cut-glass foliage became less dense the more of the monoliths he came across. As he encountered one situated close to the trail he took the opportunity to inspect it. The totems were covered in large simple runes and symbols – many jagged in appearance – and were made entirely of pure copper. The network of copper totems must ground the electrical dangers of the silicon jungle, Krieg reasoned, and prevent the crystal foliage spreading. A huge arc suddenly leapt before him, leading the cadet-commissar to the further conclusion that he was not yet close enough to the village to enjoy that privilege.

Krieg could now see the telltale rush of flecks surging up and down the surrounding trunks, heralding the advent of another deadly electrical blitz. He had to work fast. Ground-level was bad: the pattern of former arcs and bursts had already taught him that beyond the chemical floodplain, it was probably one of the reasons the trail was elevated on stilts. The commissar thumbed the heavy, archaic primer on the plasma gun and adjusted the emission setting. Aiming the sun gun at the base of the nearest set of stilts he released a blinding ball of superheated plasma at the structure.

As sizzling puddles of dissipating plasma scooted about on the surface of the foaming pool Krieg had just blown in the planet’s surface, the walkway section beside him promptly collapsed. A hobble, skip and a jump later Krieg was belly down on the planked section that had tumbled to the ground. Throwing the shimmering barrel of the plasma gun over his shoulder on its strap he proceeded to heave himself up the incline and up to the next section of elevated walkway.

Kicking with his good foot he managed to haul himself halfway above the ground by the time the electrical storm hit. Every muscle in his body cramped and spasmed, causing him to lose his position on the walkway and slide back down the smooth crystal slats. Bolts of piezoelectric power coursed over the surface of his skin, paralysing both mind and body and lancing the nerve clusters with spears of excruciating agony. He was hit.

It was impossible to tell how long the torture lasted: seconds, moments, minutes… but it felt to Krieg like an infinity of light and affliction.

When the darkness returned, the commissar was a crumpled mess at the foot of the toppled walkway. His flesh felt on fire and, indeed, in one or two spots his uniform was aflame. His breathing had been reduced to strangled gasps as his chest muscles refused to contract and allow sorely needed oxygen into his lungs. His constricted fists trembled but he dared not move for fear that his heart, raw in his chest, might burst like a ripe fruit inside his wracked body.

As his roving pupils caught a further glint of light Krieg tried to push through the paralysis, but his body would not answer. He couldn’t take another round of the torturous treatment and began to panic, his rasping breaths becoming further constricted. The light grew as it drew closer and his numb brain finally processed what he was seeing. He’d never been so glad to see the twisting, golden tongues of a simple flame in his life. It was a torch held by one of a group of dark shapes milling around him in the twilight. Large, powerful digits clasped one of his arms and turned him gently over onto his back. Bodies were still just a shadowy amalgam but the torchlight now illuminated several heavy-weight faces. Brute features and black wiry manes, plaited through with gems and crystals, decorated their scarred, colossal skulls.

Ogryns.

Krieg’s heart lifted for a moment. Ogryns were typically obedient Imperial servants. With Ishtar’s proximity to Spetzghast it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that he wasn’t the first of the Emperor’s servants to visit this miserable little corner of the galaxy. The barbarians jabbered some kind of spitsnaggle vernacular at one another, apparently fascinated by the aquila emblazoned on his cap.

A sudden fracas erupted amongst the group: growling, mawling and snapping. Something squatter and more repugnant barged its way to the front of the congregation and thrust its rancorous features in Krieg’s face. The foetid rank of that daggered maw washed over the commissar, giving him further reason to gag. Cracked, spinach-green flesh and two bloody beads for eyes sealed it for Krieg. Orks, here on Ishtar also. It too seemed interested in his cap.

A wet hackle of what Krieg could only interpret as laughter began deep inside the creature’s barrel chest. The ogryns followed suit, as was their habit – imitation being the sincerest form of flattery – and filled the forest with their savage, booming laughter.

With each fading gasp, Koulick Krieg was forced to accept that this soulless mirth was likely to be the last sound he would ever hear.

II

There were times when even Zane Mortensen thought he’d pushed his luck too far. This was one of them.

A tense silence filled the darkened interior of the Centaur, which was unusual for the Volscians, whose battle preparations usually involved hive banter and raw humour.

The major glowered in the half-light of the instrumentation panels as Kataphract’s enclosed, armoured hull creaked ominously about him.

‘This is madness,’ Hauser muttered as Garbarsky did battle with the Centaur’s controls. Hauser was one of Meeks’s believers, as his shaved dome and hooded trench coat testified, but he had a rebellious streak that often found expression in his furtive features and loose mouth. Meeks thumped a meaty palm against the corpsman’s chest that reverberated around the tiny confines of the vehicle. ‘In a good way,’ Hauser added sheepishly, dutifully chastised.

Mortensen smiled through his own anxiety and clasped the back of the Guardsman’s bald head good naturedly. ‘That’s the genius of it,’ the major assured him. ‘Those greenskin whoresons won’t see this coming.’

It was true. Nobody would have seen this coming. Nobody would have thought it possible to completely submerge an armour-enclosed Centaur fire support vehicle in corrosive, chemicular slush and infiltrate enemy territory via the tributaries of a deathworld river basin. And in the eyes of the major this was what made the plan typically Redemption Corps; other storm-trooper regiments had their specialisms, but only the Redemption Corps were known for pulling off stunts like these. Only Mortensen and his men made the impossible happen. Balls and brains, the major mused. It would have been their motto if the Redemption Corps had use for anything as useless as a motto.

Mortensen snatched up the vox receiver. ‘Gundozer, still with us?’

Crunching through the silicon shale that made up the sterile riverbed, Kataphract’s sister Centaur carried Conklin, Vedette and the rest of his troop. Mortensen had opted to go with Rask, Eszcobar and the Volscians, reasoning that the Shadow Brigade soldiers were much more likely to lose their nerve.

‘How the hell did you talk us into this?’ came back the master sergeant’s dulcet tones. ‘I don’t know how much fight this crate’s got left.’

‘She’ll hold,’ the major told him. ‘The seals are good. Remember Hesperidus?’

‘Trying to forget it. Seawater doesn’t exactly eat through the damn hull though, does it?’

‘Conklin, you’re scaring the women and children.’

‘Check my pulse, for sumpsake.’

‘You need to take a right up ahead here,’ Eszcobar informed Garbarsky as he sat next to the Shadow Brigade driver, reading from one of the topographical slates. The driver furrowed his one furious eyebrow.

‘How much?’ Garbarsky put to him moodily.

‘How the hell should I know?’ the deathworlder carped back, shrugging. ‘Hard right.’

The corpsman heaved sets of levers simultaneously forward and back, throwing the fire support vehicle into a turn. The Centaur gave a whining rattle of protest as frost-shattered gears struggled with the effort. Mortensen gave the Autegan the vox.

‘Okay sarge, we have another turn up here. Right, this time.’ Eszcobar listened intently to Conklin’s reply before an involuntary shrug rippled once again across his shoulders. ‘Er, hard right?’ Once again Garbarsky’s single eyebrow set in a cantankerous wrinkle.

The deathworlder turned to Mortensen with the slate.

‘Major, once we’ve navigated this bend we’ll be right on top of your coordinates.’

‘Thank the Emperor,’ Hauser muttered to himself.

Mortensen nodded to the rest of Meeks’s Volscians, cramped in Kataphract’s cramped hull – more so since it also housed the Centaur’s stripped down exterior weaponry – setting in motion a burst of activity.

‘Give Conklin the good news. Have his men prepare for heavy resistance.’

Eszcobar was about to comply when a splintered crack shot through the compartment. This was almost instantaneously accompanied by a stifled half-scream, mercilessly cut short. A shaft of streaming slush had fractured the driver’s armaplas viewport and blasted its way in, splashing Garbarsky full in the face. His hands had instinctively reached for his ruined features and, caught in the stream, had frozen fast to his skull.

Mortensen and Meeks were the first to act, reaching for the unfortunate driver, one under each arm. They tore him out of the seat and into the rear compartment. The Shadow Brigade soldier was thrashing and squirming like a man who was being held under a pillow.

Chemical soup was gushing through the opening now, pressing its advantage and shattering the viewport. Garbarsky’s seat warped and creaked as a growing pool of foaming death began sloshing around the compartment floorspace. Hauser and the thuggish Thule began to retreat, crawling their way up the compartment walls like cats.

‘Sal!’ Rask yelled across the foggy compartment, calling forth the Second Platoon’s field medic, Salome DuBois. Dark-skinned and close-cropped like her sergeant, DuBois pushed forward with her kit.

Meeks and the major dumped the mutilated driver in her lap, where she already had a surgical kris at the ready. In one well-practiced manoeuvre she passed the blade across Garbarsky’s throat, spraying Hauser with hot blood, opening a new mouth in his neck through which the driver took his first desperate, slurping breath. The emergency tracheotomy had given the Guardsman the vital oxygen he needed and DuBois went to work slotting a length of plastic tubing from her kit into the neat slit.

Meeks threw himself towards the gaping viewport but Mortensen grabbed him by the hood of his trench coat and wrenched him back.

‘Sergeant,’ he bawled, slipping out of his flak jacket. ‘See to your man.’ Using the back of his carapace as a shield, the major reversed on the breach, forcing back the stream. Finally he had the armour flush to the hull and slammed his back against the port to hold the blockage in place. Steaming liquid foamed about the edges of his carapace plates, cracking and hissing its way, feeling for a weakness, a way in.

‘Drive!’ he barked at an astounded Eszcobar, who did his best to straddle the compartment floor and manipulate the gears at arm’s reach. Kataphract bucked and groaned. She was dying and she knew it. The tracks and transaxles had barely coped with the turn Garbarsky had imposed upon them to negotiate the river bend. A harsh angle compounded by the bank’s incline had all but done for the fire support vehicle.

‘Get us up on that bank, trooper,’ the major rumbled.

The deathworlder grimaced, fighting for control of the Centaur: ‘Trying, sir…’ he snarled through clenched teeth.

Sergeant Meeks crossed to the other side of the crowded vehicle and reached for the swinging vox receiver. ‘Mayday, mayday. Gundozer are you receiving?’

‘I’m losing him!’ Sal called across the chaos of the compartment as Garbarsky thrashed in her arms, shock finally setting in. Similarly the Centaur was giving its last, the damage now spreading to the engine column. Crippling cold had eventually found its way into the power plant and was playing havoc with the heat exchangers. The tracks pulverised the shale of the river bed, dragging the carrier towards the surface in starts and spasms.

‘C’mon, you piece of junk,’ Mortensen urged affectionately.

Eszcobar went after the final few metres of their watery grave with renewed vigour on the stick-throttle, but the steaming slosh rolling about the floorspace had done its worst. With a splintered snap the lever came away in his hand, prompting a moment of ghastly realisation that swept through the compartment.

‘You’ve got to be…’ Hauser blurted, not believing his eyes.

As if on cue the engine died, allowing the deep freeze precious seconds to take hold, in turn extinguishing the remnants of combustive life from the vehicle and hope in the compartment.

Nobody moved as minds wrestled with the reality that they were now seriously screwed. Even Garbarsky remained still, although it was unclear as to whether this was due to sedation or cessation. They sat there for what seemed like an age, wired and wary: looking anxiously at the major for some kind of miracle. All Mortensen could hear in his head was Rosenkrantz and her earlier accusations of rashness and irresponsibility.

The silence was finally smashed by a grunt of raw frustration that erupted from Thule, who slammed his fist at the compartment wall.

‘No!’ Rask roared, reaching for the brute’s wrist, afraid that the hiver might put his knuckles straight through the frost-weakened hull.

Mortensen silenced them all with a single ‘Wait!’ before putting his ear carefully to the glistening rime on the frozen metal wall and tapping against the armour with the knuckle of his middle finger.

A grin of pure relief broke across the major’s brassy features. Tearing his shoulders from frozen carapace, as well as the top layer of skin from his back flesh, Mortensen moved away from the shattered opening. A moment of alarm and caution filled the vehicle as he pulled away from the opening, but the cries were silenced by the whisper of warm air that coursed in through the breach instead of the expected gallons of chemical fleshstripper.

This was accompanied by the sound of a Guard boot on the hull outside. Peering through the opening Mortensen could make out the robust lines of Gundozer further up the bank and the silhouettes of his storm-troopers securing the shoreline.

Kataphract’s viewport and a section of roof above the driver’s seat had just made the glassy surface of the deathworld river. Conklin was standing outside, straddling the deadly waters between the rooftops of the two Centaurs; attaching a hastily adapted tow cable to a suitable pinion.

‘Hold onto something,’ the master sergeant called in through the port before hop, skip and jumping back across his own vehicle to the shore. Gundozer grumbled up the bank, dragging her creaking sister Centaur along behind.

When both carriers were clear of the channel, Thule fired the lock seals on the back doors and kicked them wide open, liberating the trapped liquid and clearing the noxious air inside.

Mortensen was last to leave, walking along the scarred and smoking shell of the fire support vehicle and wondering just how close they had really come to a truly awful death. Gone was the brash swagger and cocky grin. As he stood on the shale, tree lined bank surrounded by his corpsmen, the major’s face assumed a bleak sobriety.

‘Report,’ he charged them gravely, wandering casually around the group, turning to each of the Guardsmen in turn.

‘Both Centaurs are out of action, Boss,’ Conklin informed him. ‘Salvaging equipment and ammunition as we speak.’ Behind them some of Gundozer’s men were stripping the vehicles of anything remotely useful.

‘Mostly burns and frostbite,’ DuBois told him, struggling to keep her voice free of accusation, ‘but Garbarsky needs nothing less than a surgical bay. Also, I need to examine your back.’

‘No time for that.’

‘You probably have chemical burns…’

‘Later,’ Mortensen insisted.

Eszcobar padded up behind them, crunching softly across the silicon, his swift reconnaissance completed.

‘Trooper?’

‘Tree line thins up ahead,’ the Autegan confirmed, gesturing to the huge shadows blacking out the sky beyond the crystalline canopy. ‘Coordinates identify our target as an abhuman camp, designated “Fort Skagg” by the Spetzghastian Mercantile Militia recruitment parties: a settlement on stilts and elevated walkways with huts all made of local materials. The greenskin rok sits just beyond.’

‘Great,’ Hauser mumbled to himself.

‘It’s subsiding on the flood plain,’ the deathworlder continued, ‘which is why it looked so much like a natural feature. Looks like they recruited extra muscle from the ogryn villages to erect a scaffold of props and braces to prevent it from sinking further and flooding.’ Mention of the supercooled flood plain only served to further unsettle the Volscians, who bridled visibly.

‘Well, that’s it then,’ Hauser announced. ‘The recruitment party must be dead: the ogryns are party to the enemy. Why not just hold up and evacuate when the bird is ready?’

‘Qvist could be alive,’ Rask inserted, his tone heavy with caution and guilt. ‘Greenskins sometimes take prisoners and equipment.’

‘Unlikely,’ Mortensen replied slowly. He didn’t like disagreeing with Rask, but his judgement was clouded with responsibility. ‘But that’s not our problem. Now we’ve got eyeball confirmation that it’s a rok, we can’t ignore the threat. That thing could open fire on Deliverance or one of the warships.’

‘We’re not equipped for that,’ Hauser pointed out with increasing desperation.

‘Hauser,’ Meeks warned.

‘Let’s call in some backup,’ the Volscian continued.

‘No,’ Sass put him straight. ‘If the enemy has Qvist’s men or their equipment they could be monitoring channels. Fearing an attack they would most likely hit first, before our ships had time to manoeuvre.’

Mortensen regarded the gathering evenly: his storm- troopers were used to vox-silence on such missions, but the Shadow Brigade soldiers and even Rask were having difficulty with the grim reality of the situation.

‘All we’ve got is the element of surprise,’ the major told them. ‘I suggest we use it. Captain?’

‘We can’t mount a direct assault on an ork rok,’ Rask confirmed finally. ‘That would be plain suicide.’

‘Looks like the blood and guts routine to me, sir,’ Conklin suggested with relish. ‘Spring any targets, sabotage the rok, quiet like.’

The major nodded. ‘Agreed. And the fewer there are to go in, the fewer there are to get caught…’

‘Finally something I can agree with,’ said Hauser with resignation.

‘Which means, I go in alone.’

Even Hauser’s nodding head suddenly lost its enthusiasm.

‘Alone, sir?’ Meeks put to him. ‘Take me and a couple of my boys: we’ll make the workload a bit lighter.’ Mortensen shook his head appreciatively.

‘That wise, boss?’ Conklin finally pitched in.

‘Wise, no. Necessary, yes. As soon as we’re rumbled, the entire mob will come down on us.’

‘The major knows what he’s doing,’ Hauser blustered.

‘Glad you feel that way, Guardsman,’ Mortensen replied, once again cupping him behind his shaved skull, ‘because in order to get into that rok, I’m going to need one hell of a diversion.’

Hauser’s gusto evaporated.

‘We’re going to need Uncle,’ Mortesen told Vedette, who peeled off to fetch him.

‘What have you got in mind?’ Eszcobar enquired.

Mortensen playfully unslipped the double-barrel grenade launcher from the deathworlder’s shoulder and popped open the weapon at the breech. He grinned down the gaping barrels at the Autegan.

‘Something big.’

III

‘Work fast,’ Rosenkrantz instructed as the three of them reached Vertigo’s roof. Only seconds before one of the forest’s furious electrical lightstorms had faded, opening their slim window of opportunity. Clambering off the hull ladder and over the starboard quad, the pilot slipped the flamer’s fuel cylinder from her back. Chief Nauls and Osric, one of her door gunners, fell to work straight away on the intakes. While Rosenkrantz bathed the quad shell with flame, blasting away the rime and warming life into the frozen thrusters, the unsmiling crew chief thrust his arm deep into one of the vents, extracting fistfuls of ice-resistant slime. Meanwhile Osric fiddled with roof valves and calibrators Rosenkrantz hadn’t even known existed.

The Jopallian was barely a boy, but Nauls had selected him because he originally hailed from indentured maintenance stock. His slender fingers moved with natural certainty across the unfamiliar machinery, his lips mumbling half-remembered incantations and blessings.

As Rosenkrantz moved to the second of the roof-mounted quad engines the aircraft became lost in deep shadow. Something wet and rubbery unexpectedly caressed the back of her neck and the pilot bolted round, sending a stream of promethium over the helmeted head of the chief.

Rosenkrantz brought the weapon under control and Nauls came out from behind the filter mount, his face furrowed with surprise and anger. The lines faded as he saw what the flight lieutenant was staring at. The shadow belonged to the bloated, ochre behemoth that Vertigo had torn through in the skies above. The collision had gashed an opening in the side of the beast’s sky sack and the creature had spent the best part of an hour drifting slowly to the ground.

The tip of one webbed tentacle drifted past Rosenkrantz and slapped the hull of the aircraft before following the gently tumbling monster into its canopy-shattering crash-landing. The giant octopoid just lay there amongst the destruction, cut to pieces by the tree-top crystal foliage, one huge, sad ocular appendage flickering around the forest in uncomprehending confusion and fright. Rosenkrantz couldn’t help but feel responsible for the alien creature’s demise, but had her own survival in this terrible place to consider and went back to work with the flamer.

That was until Chief Nauls, finished with the first intake, stood up next to the Jopallian and nudged her with his elbow.

‘Flight lieutenant,’ he murmured, nodding into the silicon forest. Shutting off the flame and dropping the flamer next to its fuel canister she followed his gesture. Hefty humanoid shapes were moving through the smashed tree line: huge, brawny savages who decorated their slabs of gross muscle with crystal trinkets and the thick blood that oozed from the myriad of nicks and slices that covered their scarred bodies. Wearing only simple skirts made of hundreds of thin copper rods hanging from their thick belts, they made eerie windchime-like chords as they crept through the crystal foliage.

‘I’ve got targets!’ an alarmed Speckels hissed across the helmet vox.

‘Hold your fire,’ Nauls growled back. Rosenkrantz found herself nodding silently as both she and the chief began to fall slowly into a rooftop crouch in an effort not to be seen: this was of course ludicrous, since they could hardly hide the aircraft also.

Ogryns. It made sense, Rosenkrantz considered. They were, after all, the only variety of human robust enough to exist on Ishtar. The ogryns fell upon the downed sky-squid with primitive bronze flensing blades and began stripping flesh from the beast as it breathed its final mighty breaths.

‘No…’ the leatherneck crew chief snarled beside her. Turning around she saw more of the abhuman primitives closing in slowly on the Spectre. Their progress was slow but steady across the treacherous forest floor and their intentions obvious. Rosenkrantz made up her mind.

‘Let them have it,’ she ordered across the vox. The flight lieutenant wanted to keep the brutes as far away from the aircraft as possible: if they actually got their hands on the Spectre they’d crush it like a tin can. Doors rolled aside and bolter fire chattered from both sides of the aircraft, reducing the tree line to a crystal frag storm. The ogryns were incredibly fast, however, tearing away at an explosive pace; their gargantuan strides clearing broiling rivulets of chemical ooze and blasting across the nightmare landscape, their black manes trailing after them.

Heavy bolt rounds plucked at their flesh, mashing up muscle and bone, but the ogryns soaked up the punishment like rockcrete, roaring through their discomfort. It was only when streams of fire crossed and doubled their stopping power did individual brutes finally succumb.

Osric was suddenly on his feet, charms and catechisms suddenly failing him among the vision of oncoming ogryns and gunfire. He’d left his side arm down in the troop bay but Rosenkrantz and Nauls both had their Navy pistols out of their holsters as a last resort.

Staring along the nose of the Spectre Rosenkrantz suddenly became aware of two monstrous savages surging across the open ground towards them. Aiming their pistols over the young gunner’s shoulder the two Jopallians plugged round after round into the barbarians. The ogryns barely flinched as the gunfire washed over them.

‘Benedict, a little assistance please,’ Rosenkrantz called down the helmet vox as her pistol went dry. As Nauls reloaded Vertigo’s nose-mounted autocannon boomed from below. Impossibly the first ogryn ran up through the merciless firepower, each direct hit punching bloody holes in his reinforced ribcage. As the monster’s head disappeared in a spray of blood and brains, his snaggle-toothed companion swung past, catching several blasts in the abdomen himself. Hauling himself up on the shoulder of his falling comrade, the ogryn bounded incredibly for the aircraft’s nosecone, his huge steps carrying him up past the annoyance of the autocannon and thundering up the Spectre’s canopy.

It was all sickeningly swift. Before Rosenkrantz knew it the ogryn was upon them, swinging his unwieldy flensing blade like a Shadebarren trunkcutter. Osric was simply cleaved in two. There was no scream or struggle: the unfortunate gunner’s body just spun furiously off the roof in two different directions.

The chief managed to slam a fresh clip home and turned his pistol on the unstoppable creature. He’d buried four or five slugs in the ogryn’s thick neck and barrel chest before the flat of the flensing blade came down brutally on Nauls’s helmet. The flight helmet and everything inside it was instantly pulverised, disappearing inside the crew chief’s trunk.

Rosenkrantz fell. She could have slipped but it was more likely some kind of primitive instinct: an unmistakable signal of her complete submission in the face of superior physical prowess. Her hand smacked the recently cleared filter and her Navy pistol bounced out of her smashed grip and skittered down the aircraft hull and out of reach.

The heels of her boots squealed on the slick roof as she attempted to get back to her feet, but this was cut short by an off-balance, opportunistic swing of the flensing blade. Arching her back and throwing her face skyward, the pilot felt the bronze blade sweep past, splashing her frantic wide eyes with the weapon’s searing slipstream. There would be no second chances. She could feel that this unthinking brute wanted to kill her; wanted to chop her up and paint the fuselage with her thick, warm blood.

It was the only weapon left to hand. Scrambling for the flamer, her heart thumping in time with every moment the beast took to bring its heavy blade to bear, Rosenkrantz unleashed the full fury of the weapon on the creature’s meaty legs. Flame roared around its knees and ankles, funnelling up the copper rod skirt and razing whatever hung beneath.

The ogryn released a baleful moan and let the mighty flense fly out of its fingers and into the forest. Its palms spread instinctively before the inferno in a futile attempt to deflect the stream before its snaggle-fanged jaw snapped forward with the intention of mangling the pilot’s face. Her response was the same. A gout of explosive promethium flayed rough, knotty flesh from the ogryn’s skull. Blaze-blasted knees finally gave and the monstrous abhuman buckled, falling down between the cockpit and the quad.

Charred, fat fingers locked around the ankle of her flight boot and lugged her across the cool metal, dragging her off the roof. New levels of nauseating fear and panic radiated through Rosencrantz as her body left the hull for the uncertainty of a plummet towards a sterile, broiling grave.

Suddenly there was a hand where Rosenkrantz had no right to expect one. Five fingers and a thumb bolstered by hydraulic ichor and the aircraft’s power plant reserves. Through the open canopy the flight lieutenant could see Benedict’s straining face, his thin lips curled back even further than usual and his face a whirlpool of rippling tendons and wasted muscle. Conduits and cables erupted from his back as the servitor extended his fixed torso and her reach to accommodate the extra pull inflicted upon the pilot’s body from the flaming dead-weight below.

Rosenkrantz hung there for what seemed like forever, suspended between the abhuman’s death-grip and Benedict’s programmed desire to keep Vertigo’s skipper alive. In the end it was the buckle that decided it. The metal rings of the flight boot were not designed to withstand such abuse and promptly bent, snapped and slipped free, liberating the pilot’s bare foot and dropping with the burning body below.

Sliding in through the opening the Jopallian’s response was swift and merciless. Slipping into the harness and settling the bare ball of her foot amongst the pedals, she fired the struggling engines and yanked the stick back between her thighs.

Vertigo answered, the sudden demand of the engines clearing the remnants of slime from the intakes and blasting the frosty thrusters back to life. The aircraft rocketed skyward, shattering the surrounding vegetation and throwing the pilot’s head back into her seat. After a short burn the livid pilot slammed on the airbrakes, throwing everyone on board towards the ceiling. Sweeping determined digits across the runes of the ordnance panel, Rosenkrantz armed the hellfires before simply detaching the missiles from both wings. She didn’t bother to fire them.

They fell silently towards the silicon forest before impacting on the planet surface and cleansing the vicinity directly below the aircraft in a superheated tsunami of destructive power.

As the rumble passed through Vertigo’s superstructure the pilot flicked the vox and opened a channel to the troop bay.

‘Status.’

‘Where’s the chief?’ Speckels came back at her.

Rosenkrantz paused, momentarily reliving the horror of Nauls’s death. ‘Chief’s gone. Status?’

‘Osric?’

‘Status?’ Rosenkrantz commanded.

The vox crackled for a few empty seconds, then there came a resigned ‘Bay secure’ from the gunner.

Rosenkrantz looked back at her servitor co-pilot. Benedict was a lifeless husk, his chest barely rising from the interface seat into which he’d resettled. The cockpit floor was black with his lifeblood both organic and automatronic.

The lieutenant returned her attention to the aircraft’s controls and the lethal deathworld beyond the armaplas of the Spectre’s canopy.

‘We’re leaving,’ she finally decided and blasted for the horizon.

IV

Krieg could swear the floor was moving.

A firm hand smacked his face, jarring him to consciousness. The blackness evaporated, leaving the indelible smudge of two dark shapes hovering in front of his aching eyes.

‘Sir?’ came a voice he didn’t recognise. ‘Commissar?’

Suddenly everything became painfully clear. They were battered and bloody – but they were Guardsmen. Dust cloaks and dungaree jackets marked them out as Spetzghastian Mercantile Militia, as well as their cheap, assembly-line equipment and perpetual understack squints. The figure speaking to him was a whelp of an officer, with green eyes and flaxen hair. Beside him squatted a hard-faced PDF sergeant with one milky-white eye, the Mercantile Militia’s Libra-style insignia sat below his thick shoulder stripes and his name: Endo. Behind them both was a merciless row of bars – probably of a cage or cell.

‘Sir?’ the officer persisted.

‘Where are we?’ Krieg croaked. He tried to move under the filthy blanket: thought better of it. The officer graciously deferred to the sergeant’s experience.

‘Ork rok,’ the Spetzghastian confirmed, his voice as hard as his face.

Krieg rolled with the information, his mind whirling with the dark possibilities it presented.

‘The whole system’s got to be swarming with greenskins.’

They both nodded gravely. As his eyes accustomed further to the gloom, Krieg could make out possibly ten or twelve other Guardsmen, sitting miserably around the walls of the crude cell. ‘Mission?’ the cadet-commissar managed.

‘Recruiting party: abhuman auxilia,’ the young officer added, almost suspiciously. He made a casual salute. ‘Bastian Qvist. Commander, Departmento Munitorum.’

Krieg took in his grim surroundings. The chamber was an irregular space with walls, floor and ceiling of raw extraterrestrial rock, cut in half by a row of thick bars, probably ripped from the hull of some junker spacecraft. On the far side of the cell chamber, out of ear-shot, a greenskin sentry occasionally fixed them with two glazed, bloody red beads.

The cell rocked with sudden violence, knocking the sergeant from his crouch and forcing some of the Guardsmen to grab for the bars. The muffled thunder of explosions found their way through the labyrinth of rough-hewn rock passages and bounced around the chamber.

‘What the…?’

‘We were going to ask you,’ the commander put to him.

‘We’re definitely going down,’ a cut-lipped woman in a shabby Mercantile Militia uniform called from behind.

‘You here alone?’ Qvist asked with an unmistakable hint of incredulity. Krieg wouldn’t have minded – had it not been the truth – but he could hardly tell them that. Krieg knew what the rock-smothered din outside meant.

‘Storm troop: Redemption Corps,’ he told them finally.

The reaction was instantaneous: a wave of relief and premature jubilation crashed through the group, with the whippersnapper commander slapping aside the sergeant’s shoulder with warm aggression.

‘I told you.’

The sergeant nodded coolly.

Another stomach-dropping jolt cut their bleak merriment short as the floor simply left them and came to a crashing halt a metre and a half below their feet. Krieg hit the uneven rock floor with a bone-aching smack and moaned gently in quiet torture.

Despite the initial shock of the plunge the Militiamen were swiftly back on their feet. Cries of alien alarm and thuggish panic filled the access corridor outside. The cantilever bulkhead leading into the cell chamber was ajar, clearing the floor by a bayonet’s length and allowing the Guardsmen a view of the stampede of boots crashing past the doorway outside. The cell chamber suddenly became swathed in steam and this was enough to rouse even the attention of their half-fanged jailer. The warty, bottle-green man-eater had been filing its remaining tusk to a cruel point and picking meat out of the gaps in its monstrous teeth with grubby claws. The clamour outside the door had barely raised one of his wiry eyebrows – orks given as they were to regular brawls and slaying, even amongst their own kind – but the sudden mist and foaming sheet of chemical brume that washed in under the bulkhead was enough to galvanise even it to action.

Sweeping up its rough-and-ready shooter from where it hung on a gory strap of plaited human scalp, the jailer loped past the alarmed calls of the Spetzghastians towards the door. It silenced the Guardsmen with one stab of the bolter barrel, driving them several steps away from the bars, before approaching the bulkhead.

The steaming flood receded as quickly as it had entered. It seemed the ork rok was succumbing to the supercooled flood plain, sinking deeper into the silicon swamp and flooding as it did. Undoubtedly it was being helped to its doom by the explosions outside.

The greenskin brute followed the retreating waters, yanking up the cantilever door on its rollers and sticking its snaggle-toothed maw out into the corridor. As the door seesawed a body dropped from the roof door space and hit the cell chamber floor with practiced fluidity, rolling across one carapace shoulder and righting in a combat stance. With one knee to the ground and a hellgun up and aimed squarely at the door, the storm-trooper waited for the greenskin warder to turn and re-enter.

Krieg and his cellmates watched with eager anticipation as the storm-trooper blasted the monster with a disciplined staccato of supercharged las-fire. The thuggish alien was flung back into the corridor, slamming into the rough-hewn wall. Dropping its weapon it put up two meaty, green palms that soaked up the last few bolts. The storm-trooper clearly expected the beast to drop and halted his fire: it was standard practice for specialist troops – power had to be conserved and was reserved largely for precision kills and suppression.

The alien monster smouldered in the corridor before blasting away from the wall and out of the smoke at the lone storm-trooper. A green blitzkrieg of savagery, the ork charged like an enraged grox, surging across the cell chamber with shocking speed. The storm-trooper hammered the monster’s barrel-body with another tidy stream of fire before the creature acquired him. Backhanding the hellgun aside with animal rage the ork sank its filthy claws into the storm-trooper’s torso carapace. Lifting him off his boots, the greenskin ran the trooper into the opposite wall, drawing an audible, lung-emptying gasp from the soldier. Holding him there with one brute fist the jailer proceeded to beat the storm-trooper to death with the other.

Like a rag doll the monster beat him this way and that, one particularly savage blow finding its mark and knocking the helmet across the chamber. Slamming the storm-trooper’s body back and forth between the craggy wall and the unforgiving bars of the cells the greenskin eventually settled on throttling the soldier against the crooked metal.

Krieg leaned forward. Even from the back, the shaven skull of the storm-trooper was easy to identify as Mortensen’s, with its grim numerals and scarring. Incredibly, the cadet-commissar marvelled, the Gomorrian must have slipped into the rok, spilling blood only when he had to – and then as silently and surreptitiously as possible.

There was nothing surreptitious about the way Mortensen buried his storm blade into the back of the ork’s bald, green head. The beast blinked and its sadistic features froze as the major’s survival knife squirmed around in the monster’s brain. Taking full advantage of the creature’s bewilderment, Mortensen used the handle of the weapon to haul himself up on the greenskin’s hunched shoulders and slam the serrated blade straight down into the sinew of its muscular neck.

The jailer’s crushing grip on the storm-trooper suddenly intensified, its great brawny arms encircling the Gomorrian in a crushing bear hug. As the desperate melee continued, with Mortensen and the monster smashing each other against the cell, the grip of the major’s side arm played a messy tune on the jagged bars. Up until this point, Krieg had kicked painfully back into one darkened corner, out of sight: he would have a hard time explaining to the major how he came to be incarcerated on board the ork rok. Qvist’s slender hand slipped through the bars eagerly for the weapon, but Krieg managed to lay his frostbitten fingers on it first, yanking it free of the storm-trooper’s belt holster.

‘Not yet,’ he told the officer solemnly. Krieg didn’t exactly know why he’d gone for the weapon. Instinct, he supposed. The Departmento Munitorum officer would in all likelihood have emptied the clip at the ork brute, but the commissar realised that they could ill afford to attract any more attention to the cell-block. On the other hand, it was possible that Krieg had claimed the weapon merely to deny the major an easy rescue. It was tempting to consider Krieg’s mission all but completed at the hands of some alien thug. At the very least the commissar needed Mortensen alive to open the cell door. If nothing else, the major would have spent himself in the battle with the greenskin and, if it came to it, made himself an easier target for the cadet, who wasn’t exactly in the peak of fitness himself.

The Redemption Corps major had other things on his mind at that moment, tearing his knife back across the ork’s throat and severing both its windpipe and jugular. Something like a survival instinct, embedded deep inside the creature’s primitive brain, gave and the greenskin got to the weapon first. To the great relief of the storm-trooper the ork released its grip on the carapace and wrapped its meaty claws around the handle of the embedded storm blade. With his weapon torn free of its knotted neck, Mortensen was forced to cling onto the patchwork flak and ringmail adorning the greenskin’s back as the ork clutched for him.

After several near misses, with Mortensen’s head almost finding its way into the greenskin’s vice-like grip, the major finally got a better hold on the wild beast. Krieg flinched as the major struck the bars with unforgiving force. Stripped of the kind of weapons likely to stop an ork in its tracks, Mortensen was using the only resource left to him: brute strength. Somehow he’d snaked his bulging arms around the greenskin’s gushing throat and was squeezing for all he was worth.

The ork was clawing at the storm-trooper’s arms and throwing itself into the rocky walls and the bars of the cell. Krieg could hear the major’s ragged sighs as each impact increased in power and determination. It was gruesome to watch – Mortensen broken up against every hard edge and sharp corner in the chamber – but still the Gomorrian held on, denying his opponent vital oxygen. Finally, like some wounded beast of the plains, the ork staggered to its knees, clasping the bars with both hands – only to be lashed at and stamped upon by militia issue combat boots.

When the creature was still, and he was sure it was down, Mortensen unsaddled himself and reached for his storm blade, swiftly finishing what he had started and leaking the unconscious greenskin’s life all over the rough-hewn floor. There was little in the way of Spetzghastian euphoria: freedom was close and the Mercantile Militiamen stood there in desperate expectation.

The key was a simple barrel turner and was shaped like a pronged tuning fork. With guidance from the militia sergeant, Mortensen found it hanging around the jailer’s neck on a wire cord. Swinging the cell door open, the bruised and beaten Mortensen took in the rag tag band of Guardsmen.

‘Commander Qvist?’

‘Me, sir,’ the recruitment officer said, stepping forward and offering his hand.

Mortensen didn’t take it.

‘Right, listen up,’ the storm-trooper announced, addressing the entire cell. ‘My name is Major Zane Mortensen: the Redemption Corps storm-troopers will be your rescuers today. Don’t go losing your heads, though. We’re not out of the woods here yet by a long shot.’ The flint-faced sergeant nodded quietly. ‘The escape route is simple: follow this corridor and turn left. Then just follow the bodies.’ Mortensen entered the cell and began helping the wounded militiamen to their unsteady feet. ‘My men have organised some preoccupations for our greenskin friends, so you shouldn’t encounter much in the way of resistance. My corpsmen will be waiting outside with medical supplies, weapons and fresh ammunition. Be ready to give as good as you get. Go!’

The Spetzghastians responded immediately, stomping and hobbling for the cantilever bulkhead. As Mortensen helped the cut-lipped Spetzghastian to the cell door, Commander Qvist went to pick up the greenskin’s abandoned shooter.

‘Leave it,’ the major commanded. The young officer hovered over the weapon. Krieg watched Mortensen approach and slunk into the farthest, darkest corner of the cell. He stopped, vaguely annoyed. ‘You won’t be able to aim the damn thing and most probably, it’ll blow up in your hands. That junk only works for the greenskins.’

Still Krieg hadn’t moved. ‘What’s with him?’ Mortensen asked, surprised that the prospect of freedom hadn’t put a spring in the figure’s step.

Qvist stood with the major at the doorway, confused. ‘I thought he was one of yours.’

The major squinted. Krieg came out from behind the filthy blanket. So did the autopistol.

‘Krieg?’ Mortensen hissed in disbelief. Qvist’s young face creased in further perplexity.

The cadet-commissar levelled the weapon at the Gomorrian. Diamanta Santhonax’s commands cutting through the confusion in his heart.

‘Major Mortensen: you are charged with one hundred and five Tactica violations – edicts epsilon through alpha – sixteen counts of confederacy, martial treason and sedition of the creed and finally contravention of Stoltz Ultimatum.’ Krieg let his words hang in the bleakness of the cell. ‘Which is punishable by death.’

Mortensen just stood there, arms and neck pulsing with the tension of the situation. His eyes burned back into Krieg’s own unflinching orbs.

‘Best save a couple of slugs for yourself,’ the major recommended coldly. ‘Because once you’re back in the world, your life won’t be worth spit.’

‘I’ll take my chances,’ Krieg assured him. The commissar suddenly felt the ghostly sensation of a weapon being pointed at him. Without taking the autopistol off the major, he gave the Militia commander austere eyes. And found himself staring up the short barrel of a laspistol. Endo had returned from the greenskin’s grotto where the Spetzghastian rifles had been scavenged and stored. He clutched his own lasgun to his chest and looked on in horror as his commander committed career suicide with his own reclaimed side arm.

Krieg’s lip curled. ‘This doesn’t concern you, commander. This is the Emperor’s work. Don’t be a fool.’

‘Sir!’ Sergeant Endo called. The Spetzghastian wanted nothing to do with what was happening between Krieg and Mortensen and urged his young officer to follow suit. Qvist flicked his eyes from Krieg to Mortensen to the sergeant and then back again. Words abandoned him.

‘I appreciate the sentiment commander, but Commissar Krieg here is right about one thing – at least – this is my problem,’ Mortensen told the Departmento Munitorum officer through gritted teeth. ‘Let me deal with it.’

It happened so quickly.

Mortensen hovered, eager for an advantage. Qvist’s finger slipped across the trigger of his laspistol, although it was anyone’s guess as to whether or not he actually intended discharging the weapon. This was not a chance the commissar had been trained to take. Krieg’s thumb snapped across the autopistol, priming the heavy-weight side arm. Suddenly the cell chamber was filled with excruciating noise. Commander Qvist had been thrown backwards across the room as Krieg put a round through the commander’s gut. Sergeant Endo vaulted across the chamber, skidding down on his knees to the officer’s side.

Mortensen went to move, but Krieg shook the autopistol at him, keeping the major pinned to the spot.

‘Well?’ Mortensen barked across the room. The sergeant rapidly fell to checking the young officer’s vitals. His belly was already sodden with gore as the stomach wound steadily leaked the commander’s lifeblood. The wound was clean, however, as Krieg had intended it.

‘He’s alive,’ the sergeant confirmed stoically.

‘What’s the matter, Mortensen?’ Krieg put to the major. ‘Worried about your reputation?’

‘Bloody idiot,’ the Gomorrian erupted at the prone, glaze-eyed Qvist.

‘Get him out of here,’ Krieg ordered. ‘Now!’

Endo took the softly groaning commander over one shoulder, then holding the major’s gaze for a second, disappeared through the bulkhead in pursuit of his men.

Mortensen sagged and then stared down at his boots.

‘Major Mortensen, you have been found wanting,’ Krieg informed him. ‘Prepare to receive the Emperor’s judgement.’

Mortensen’s eyes came up to meet Krieg’s own. ‘Do it…’ he instructed with soft resignation. It wasn’t a dare.

Krieg tensed his finger; the trigger was reassuringly heavy. The pistol willed itself to fire.

+Koulick Krieg…+

Krieg blinked. Something was inside his head: it felt like an arachnid nesting in his brain, giving birth to a thousand tiny but irresistible thoughts, crawling around his mind.

‘Do it!’ Mortensen snarled, almost indignant at the delay.

Krieg tried to comply. He thought of his backbreaking Legionnaire’s servitude on a hundred different worlds, his years of pious service to the Ordo Hereticus – and Canoness Santhonax standing over him, her eyes alight with passion and her thin lips curled in righteous dissatisfaction. Every second of his service to the God-Emperor had led him to this moment – yet he struggled to act. He felt the trigger meet the resistance of the pistol’s firing mechanism.

+Koulick Krieg…+

A stream of bright, thick blood fell from his nostril and splattered his arm. Krieg looked down for the briefest moment, moving his fingers from the splatter to his nose. He was going to be sick.

His stomach flipped, launching everything inside skyward. Vomit hit the wall and floor of the cell beside the cadet-commissar and just kept coming. His eyes were closed and his torso heaved but his arm was pumped like some tormented serpent, ready to strike at the slightest sensation that the major was advancing.

When he came back up for air, with some of the stringy gruel still clinging to his chin, Krieg found to his surprise that Mortensen hadn’t moved.

‘Krieg?’ Mortensen asked, but the commissar stopped him by smacking the grip of the pistol repeatedly against his temple and roaring in aggravation and anguish. He turned the weapon on the major once again, but the desire simply wasn’t there.

‘I…’ the cadet-commissar began.

‘Save it,’ Mortensen growled. Both men turned to find their charade had been played out in front of a small audience. Endo and Commander Qvist were being manhandled through the bulkhead and the chamber had become a gallery of green faces, beady eyes and gun barrels.

‘You had your chance,’ the Redemption Corps major told Krieg. ‘You still want my blood, you’re going to have to get in line.’

V

He’d visualised a hive of mayhem: a barbarian force in preparation for war. Mortensen was sorely disappointed. There was no fighting, no tusk baring, no shooting. As the major was dragged up through the rocky levels he was witness to the rank and file thug-soldiers of the rok going about their outlandishly orderly business. It went against the grain of every microbe of knowledge and experience the major had gathered over the many years he’d spent fighting the damn things.

Fully manned orbital gun emplacements swarmed with greenskins and runts and aircraft bays brimmed with squadrons of heavily armed patrol aircraft: if the major and his men hadn’t risked their treacherous up-river infiltration, it was unlikely that they would ever have got near the ork rok. Between the deathworld swamps and the greenskin guests, Ishtar was turning out to be a pretty inimical place to be.

The four soldiers were taken to a cavernous chamber right at the top of the rok: Mortensen could tell this because there was a massive hole in the roof, allowing the dim, deathworld twilight to flood in. There was a similarly sized opening in the floor of the cave, leading back down into the heart of the riddled asteroid, illumination from which waxed and waned with the rhythmic roar of mighty machineries below. A ramshackle concentric structure of girders, pylons and suspension wires ran up out of the hole, up through the chamber and out of the top of the rok, reaching for the sky like some great antennae to the stars. The mysterious structure hummed unnaturally and crackled with a sallow energy.

Here the brute squad put them on their knees with savage blows to the calves and left them. Mortensen cast a look up around the rims of his eyelids, catching the impression of a walkway and sentry posts, each manned by a begoggled, gun-toting, greenskin thug. Something thundered up steadily behind them across the hollow grille flooring. Something big.

Mortensen went to turn his head but was dissuaded by a fat green hand that enveloped his head like a scrapyard claw-winch and snapped it back front and centre.

The floor suddenly jolted as a brutal clockwork mechanism went to work on one wall. The grille platform juddered upwards, bringing it in line with some kind of command centre carved into the cavern wall. It was crowded with levers, wheels and simple gauges and dripped with sparking cables and steam lines.

The barbaric instrumentation was crawling with greenskin runts: monitoring, adjusting and trying to keep out of the way of their larger brethren. At the heart of this chaos lay a battered captain’s throne – Imperial in design – probably ripped out of some unfortunate vessel that became lost in the warp and fell foul of this rocky behemoth. Prowling around the throne on knotted chains were a pack of walking jaws – man-eating pets that greenskins traditionally kept close. Upon seeing the four of them rise before the throne on the rumbling gantry, the dagger-fangs went insane, tearing at their rusty leashes and yapping a horrible chorus of throaty gnarls. On the throne sat a mournful looking creature in thick, gaudily painted armour, a crocodilian cloak and a tooth-inlaid headdress – giving him the appearance of being swallowed by some horrific alien creature. The greenskin was clearly very old, its mauled face-flesh cracked and dark with age and its protracted skull and tusks sagging with overgrowth.

There was something eerie about the entire atmosphere, the major noted. Mortensen couldn’t quite place it at first and then he realised, it was the sound. There wasn’t any. Orks, by their nature, were loud and bombastic creatures, their huge barrel chests and cavernous mouths equipping them to terrify their enemies with a cacophony of savage blood hunger. The mock bridge of the ork rok was as silent as a cathedral, however, each monster communicating effortlessly with one another through what seemed to be the silence of passive fang-baring and narrowed eyes. With the slightest of gestures the enemy commander engaged the attention of a junior officer – an obscene individual in a parody uniform and cap, complete with trailing tassels and jumbo medals.

It wheeled an unfamiliar looking object across the bridge on a tracked trolley and positioned it in front of his warlord. It looked like one of those clunky, old-fashioned diving helmets Mortensen had seen some of the more desperate archeohunters use in the submerged caves of the Haephastus undersump. Instead of an air hose, the box trailed a pipe and rubber facemask that the officer affixed to his boss’s long face. On two sides of the device were crude speakers and upon the front, a faceplate that the greenskin aide slid aside with a fingerclaw.

Inside sloshed a sickly yellow liquid and in the suspension sat a large ragged head. The head was shot through with fat, dirty needles and had clearly been separated from its torso for a reasonable amount of time: despite that, Mortensen could make out an abhuman face and one that had seen service in the ranks of the Imperial Guard, if the primitive forehead tattoos were anything to go by. Then it clicked. Mortensen shuffled on his knees. He was staring at Sergeant Lompock – the ogryn bonehead that had been guiding Qvist’s Mercantile Militia platoon to the villages.

The major felt a shiver run down his spine as the contraption came appallingly to life. As the warboss spat his guttural greenspeak down the pipe the ogryn’s eyeless head twitched and spoke, the bass gargle reverberating around the control centre.

‘Have-fought-the-weak-bastard-spawn-of-the-Carcass-Emperor-my-whole-life. Your-rags-and-regalia-have-
meaning,’ the boss accused, pointing a crooked, gauntleted finger at Mortensen and Krieg. ‘This-much-I-know. Tell-my-shootas-send-plenty-lead-the-way-of-
such-markings.’ The ogryn coughed a kind of macabre chuckle.

‘Your shootas can’t be very good then, can they?’ Mortensen spat smugly. ‘I appear to still be here.’

‘Not-for-long,’ the long tusk told him. ‘Your-little-assault. Inventive-or-suicidal-cannot-tell-which. Matters-not. Simply-sent-ten-thousand-of-my-battle-kindred-to-the-world-you-call-Tancred-day-ahead-of-schedule.’

‘You’re greenskin savages,’ Krieg seethed. ‘You don’t keep schedules.’

‘Schedules-yes-battleplans-yes. How-you-think-forces-coordinated?’

The major laughed. ‘Didn’t think they were.’

The ork warboss thrust his elongated jaw at the Gomorrian. ‘Mine-are…’ he assured them with conviction. ‘And-I-have-the-Imperial-pig-citizens-of-Tancred’s-World-under-my-knife-to-prove-it.’

‘Impossible,’ Mortensen shot back, his forced merriment evaporated. ‘We’d know.’

‘Like-knew-about-your-factory-world?’

‘Cult spree killings preceded invasions on both worlds,’ Krieg informed the major. ‘Algernon, too.’

‘Algernon-belong-my-masters-already.’

‘What are you?’ hissed Mortensen, shaking his head. He couldn’t believe that he was talking to an ork. Mortensen had fought all kinds of greenskin filth on a score of different worlds. He’d never come across anything that spoke like this thing. Its words were laced with more than the usual animal cunning he’d come to expect from greenskin barbarians: and that was dangerous enough. There was something distinctly alien about this alien, if that were possible.

The ancient warlord seemed to consider his question seriously. ‘Am-evolving. Am-enlightened.’ The greenskin slumped – back to business. ‘Like-I-know-things-you-know-things. Things-I-must-know. Quickly. System-
reinforcement. Fleet-deployment,’ the boss gestured at the open sky. ‘Usually-get-my-sawbonez-to-sew-your-puny-flesh-as-one,’ the ancient warlord told them, nodding at the monstrosity that stood behind them. Again, Mortensen attempted to snatch a glance at the greenskin surgeon, but the beast’s mechanised, mantrap jaws snapped in cold and close, causing the storm-trooper to swallow, wrinkle his nose and turn back towards the warboss. ‘Have-you-share-one-set-of-organs-till-one-spillz-gutz-at-my-feet,’ the ork warlord continued. ‘Sadly-no-time. Quick-demonstration-needed. Make-intention-clear.’

The surgery-happy hulk behind them stirred. He snatched Sergeant Endo from his knees and dragged him across the platform, towards the metal structure at the centre of the cavern.

The soldiers watched as the stoop-backed monstrosity effortlessly trailed the militiaman behind him. Its head was a metal nightmare: serrated, hydraulic maw, metal dome skull and two telescopic eyes that protruded like insect antennae. Despite its spine being buckled by years of supporting the overgrown cranial adaptations, the greenskin’s back was still a head taller than any of the Imperials. Clomping boots, a butcher’s belt and a blood-splashed leather apron completed the picture.

‘What’s it doing?’ the major hissed.

‘Teleporter,’ Krieg informed him. ‘Some tribes reputedly have a good grasp of the technology. Explains how they’ve infiltrated so successfully. There are probably roks like this dotted all over the Spetzghastian system: waystations for transporting hardware and troops from one moon to the next. That’s how an entire invasion force just seemed to appear on Illium.’

Mortensen recalled the strange empty hole burned out of existence below decks in the Mortis Maximus: how the greenskins must have gained entry with similar technologies, bypassing the god-machine’s armour and shields.

The warboss left his throne, trailing its ghoulish translator, and crossed the cluttered bridge, throwing heavy levers, tapping gauges and spinning wheels as he did. As it yanked a handle on the wall something heavy was released from the ceiling and Mortensen, Krieg and even the dazed and bleeding Qvist all hit the deck in the belief that they were going to be flattened. Metres from the platform the object was snapped unceremoniously to a halt by the heavy-duty chains that supported it and swung to one side. As Mortensen dared to stare upwards he found himself looking at a burnished metal disc: something not unlike the magnetic attachments used on some derricks to unload vessels in cargo bays.

‘Teleporter. Yes,’ the warlord confirmed. It simply glanced at the barbaric surgeon who took the writhing sergeant in both crushing fists and pitched Endo off the rampart. The Spetzghastian, who had been so calm and sober up to this point, let rip a single scream before falling through the girders of the pylon and disappearing in the stream of imperceptible teleporter energy streaming up out of the rok.

Mortensen and Krieg turned back to the aged greenskin. They found it closer than ever – manipulating further control knobs and fat switches. As the greenskin casually span an important looking calibrator, Mortensen went to rise once again, his ill-restrained fury spilling over like stew in a cauldron. Krieg grabbed his shoulder and tore him back down. The disc above their heads suddenly washed them with an unnatural heat. A kind of charge built across the surface of the metal with sparks skittering around the outside and falling in towards a power vortex gathering in the centre.

The major closed his eyes as the air about them blanched. When he opened them again everything was blurred, but as the seconds followed and realisation dawned he found that everything was in fact very clear: it was Endo that was blurred.

The sergeant had been rematerialised in front of them, but the warboss had intentionally warped the insane genius of the device with his ham-fisted alterations. Endo quivered and steamed: the teleporter had shredded his body, molecule by molecule and then reassembled him as a botched and bloody flesh sculpture. With gut-punching horror Mortensen realised that some structures had achieved true replication. One barely comprehending, milky eyeball thrashed its pupil at them in agony and somewhere deep inside the pulp of mangled bone and organs a mouth squealed incessantly.

Mortensen broke free of the commissar’s grip and surged for the ork warlord: he didn’t get far. The brute surgeon was behind him, grabbing the storm-trooper by the skull and forcing him back down on the grille. The boss came closer still – confident in its experimenter’s ability to restrain the puny human. Sergeant Lompock’s drowning commentary echoed around the cavernous chamber.

‘If-you-don’t-wish-to-see-the-inside-of-your-own-body-tell-me-now-all-you-know. Promise-I-kill-you-
quick. A-soldier’s-death.’

Mortensen’s eyes flashed from the spasming mess that was Endo to the uncompromising, alien orbs of the ork warboss. ‘Don’t-worry-about-your-friend. He-won’t-suffer-long.’ The greenskin turned his back on Mortensen and clicked his claws, signalling one of the gretchin runts attending his throne to unslip the warboss’s dagger-fanged pets. The pack of monsters bounded across the control centre, their chains flashing after them, and set upon the malformed mound of human flesh, tearing the unfortunate Spetzghastian to shreds.

Mortensen took his chance. With the greenskins enjoying the wretched spectacle, the major threw back his head and pushed away from the floor with a powerful thrust. Putting his left hand on his right fist he threw his arm backwards with all the might he could manage. The elbow buried itself in the greenskin surgeon’s midriff and would have broken an ordinary man in two. The alien monster simply gave a muffled grunt from beneath its trapjaw maw.

Then, something completely unexpected happened. Instead of reacquiring the major, who was now loose and backing away from the greenskin, the creature instead reached for its stomach. Mortensen fantasised that he’d actually hurt the brute: perhaps broken something inside its alien body. Suddenly something dropped to the floor from below the surgeon’s bloodstained leather apron. A belt of sandbags had hit the deck, one splitting open and spilling deathworld sand through the grille. Human and alien stared on in shock and confusion. The moment was broken with sudden action – this time from the greenskin surgeon, who bounded forward like some prehistoric reptile, closing with its slowly comprehending superior.

A shape thudded across the grille floor between the soldiers and the feasting pack. It was green, bloody and fixed in a mask of shock and confusion. As it bounced to a full stop on the gore-splattered platform Mortensen realised that it was the ork warlord’s head, snapped clean off by his surgeon-henchman’s metallic jaws.

Tearing a clawful of stikkbombz from its belt the greenskin lobbed the grenades deep into the rok’s crowded bridge. Runt operators and the warboss’s vicious pets had the good sense to bolt for their lives but the bully-boy minders and the mock-uniformed officer couldn’t extricate themselves fast enough from the cluttered command centre and went up with the bridge in a tempest of frag and fire.

The platform sang with the percussion of shots from above. Crouching low the major grabbed the injured Commander Qvist and pulled him to a sheltered spot in the now blasted bridge. Krieg tried to hobble to the girder-lined wall but was forced back by an unlucky confluence of fire. Crouching beside Mortensen the two men watched the ork torturer stand amongst the lead storm, his meaty shoulders hunched and his metal skull expressionless and steady.

During a break in the fire the greenskin slipped its bloodstained hands beneath its leather apron and pulled out two chunky, automatic pistols with drum magazines and snub barrels. Turning the weapons skyward the greenskin went to work on the clumsy marksmen. Rounds tore through the gantry with precision and economy, ripping up through the legs of each shooter before the chief torturer moved on to the next target. Mortensen had never seen such dexterity and aim in a greenskin before: the day was proving, however, that there was a great deal about this particular breed of ork he’d never seen before. Bodies were crashing to the platform like meteorites and as the greenskin turned its weapons on the last of the gunners with a final, murderous arc of fire, it let out a savage bellow of rage and triumph that bounced around the walls of the cavernous chamber.

Mortensen couldn’t take his eyes off the creature: its brute potency was entrancing. Then, as the roar continued, it began to assume a more recognisable pitch. The major watched as the alien’s brawny arms and legs rippled and spasmed – the puce-green flesh blotching ebony brown and then black. Sandbag after sandbag of disguised bulk rained from beneath the leather apron. Pieces of scavenged armour and barbaric tools of torture thumped to the ground as belts and harnesses slid off the new slender lines of the transforming torso. Bone stretched and splintered; sockets popped and dislocated limbs ripped through sickening undulating flesh and snapped back in place. The monster’s clockwork cranium slipped down the figure’s straightening back and smashed into the floor. The roar was now a scream and the pain was of a very human variety. She had a face of two halves: one side wore the distinction and solemnity of an Imperial servant; the other was a crater of hollow bone and wasted flesh.

Finally the scream came to a resonant close and the stranger stood in the middle of the blasted platform in only a black gossamer bodyglove that seemed to cling to her torso like ink. Only at the wrists did the garment seem to expand to accommodate forearm reinforcements, helping her to support the weight of the huge greenskin pistols she was carrying.

Mortensen turned to Krieg, who was just as mesmerised and, possibly for the first time aboard the ork rok, a little fearful.

‘Could today get any vrekkin’ weirder?’ the major burst and went to present himself to their new ally. Krieg grabbed him and pushed him back against the ruined command centre wall.

‘Are you out of your mind?’ the commissar said. Qvist groaned and slumped at their feet, the shock of his injuries causing him to fall regularly in and out of consciousness. Mortensen frowned.

‘Very possibly. She’s an infiltrator – here for the boss. She infiltrated the infiltrators,’ Mortensen told Krieg, not a little amused by his impromptu jest. ‘We’re ahead of the game, for once.’

‘They can’t be trusted,’ Krieg insisted. He hesitated, before committing himself: ‘Trust me.’

‘Trust you?’ the major guffawed. ‘She’s an Imperial assassin: the operative word here is “Imperial”. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up on current events but she single-handedly vanquished our enemies. I trust her more than I trust you: she hasn’t put a gun in my face.’

Mortensen shrugged the cadet off and stepped out from behind the corner. The assassin was walking calmly towards them.

Mortensen smiled. ‘Throne, am I glad to–’

The assassin’s arms came up and unleashed a stream of rapid fire at the major. Slipping down the rock and skidding back around the corner, Mortensen turned his head to one side, feeling the rounds pepper the wall behind him and whiz past his cheek. It had all happened so fast, he was still smiling. ‘You were saying?’ he put to the commissar.

Mortensen hated the idea of relying on the young cadet but it was increasingly evident that the man was becoming a necessary evil. Despite his turncoat sensibilities, in the face of such fast-moving events and a singularly terrifying opponent, Krieg wasn’t looking half bad as an ally.

‘I’ve seen this operative before. I think the boss was a bonus. You’re the target.’

‘Groxcrap,’ the major hissed back.

‘She would have killed you outright, but she would have had to blow her cover before she was ready. She waited until you were both together.’

‘Look, I piss very important people off on a daily basis,’ Mortensen admitted. ‘Enough even – it seems – to justify a battlefield execution, but I’ve done nothing to warrant the attention of one of the Temples.’

‘Apparently, they don’t agree.’

‘You knew about this?’

Krieg exchanged places with Mortensen, who was more than happy to place the commissar between him and the assassin.

‘Think I’d waste my time being here if I did?’ the cadet put to him. Krieg ventured one eye around the rocky corner and was rewarded with a fresh eruption of gunfire. The pair edged further around the rock, dragging Qvist with them.

‘Doesn’t seem too hot on you either,’ Mortensen said with some satisfaction. At least while the assassin had her weaponry clearly levelled at the both of them it was unlikely the commissar would have time to follow his own interest in spilling Mortensen’s blood. In order to have any chance at all against their attacker the major reasoned that Krieg would need him as much as Mortensen needed Krieg.

Krieg edged away from the corner. ‘The Officio Assassinorum aren’t known for their fondness for loose ends – she’ll kill us all.’

Mortensen’s top lip wrinkled. He threw glances around the chamber with its myriad of floors and mighty clockwork mechanisms. Looking down through the grille flooring he could see a thunderhead of freezing gas billowing its way out of rocky bulkheads and up through the floors below. Greenskins were fleeing: stomping and scrambling their way to freedom, away from the certainty of a supercooled, watery grave.

A gloriously familiar sound greeted the major’s ears. The simple click of a firing mechanism with nothing to fire. Mortensen wasn’t going to hang around while the assassin reloaded her pistols. Grabbing a length of titanium piping from the abundant debris of the control centre, Mortensen pulled the commissar aside once again and sidled along the wall to the corner.

‘This is an Imperial Assassin: she could kill you in her sleep,’ Krieg stated flatly.

‘You got any better ideas?’ the Gomorrian growled dangerously.

Krieg pulled his Legionnaire’s bayonet out from where he’d hidden it in the lining of his flak jacket.

‘We take her together.’

Mortensen ground his teeth. He had no idea why he was being targeted – let alone Krieg. He made a promise to himself to find out if he made it off the deathworld alive. In order to do that he knew this was an alliance he could ill-afford to refuse.

Mortensen gave the commissar an unreadable look before nodding slowly at him and then to himself.

‘On three, then…’ the major mumbled.

Krieg flicked his eyes at the corner: the assassin was already standing there – her good eye burning into them with expectation.

‘Damn,’ Mortensen spat before launching himself at the dark figure. The pipe came down with all the power and precision the Gomorrian could muster, and would have cleaved an ordinary person into the ground. The assassin was a blaze of movement, however, shifting effortlessly to one side. As the pipe bounced off the grille floor, Mortensen followed through with another brutal pitch. This time the assassin weathered the blow, smoothly deflecting it off her reinforced forearms. Krieg came at her from the other side, holding his bayonet like a dagger and flashing it at the assassin with well-practiced flourishes. Time and again the pipe and blade came at the operative with increasingly desperate and inventive combinations, but to little avail. The assassin was merely toying with them.

Finally she began to counter with her own exotic and decisive combat manoeuvres, turning Krieg’s knife aside and slamming the back of his skull into the wall with an inescapable flat-footed kick to the chin. It almost looked like the assassin had grown bored. Everything up to this point had been mere training or the frustrations that came with assuming a form that was not her own.

Krieg’s bayonet clattered to the floor and the stunned commissar slid to the ground, his face bloody and his eyes blank. Another of the major’s vicious swings cut through the air beside the evading Imperial agent. Twisting gracefully along the length of the pipe the assassin stabbed at nerve clusters in Mortensen’s neck with the tips of her palms before acrobatically flipping and slamming the major back with the ball of one foot. She was about to conclude with an equally outlandish flykick and would have done so, if it hadn’t have been for the sudden lurch experienced by the rok as the colossal craft continued its inevitable journey to the depths of the chemical flood plain.

Krieg tumbled along the wall and Mortensen fell backwards, the floor simply not being where it had been seconds before. Only the assassin managed any kind of a landing, launching herself back off the grille with her hands, somersaulting and dropping the new distance to the ground with assurance. Mortensen was waiting for her.

Hitting the floor first with his face and then rolling across one shoulder, the major was ready. Sweeping the bar parallel to the floor, Mortensen hamstrung the landing operative, sending her crashing to the platform. Scrambling across the floor the major buried the warped end of the pipe in the assassin’s already mangled face. The agent was sufficiently dazzled to allow two more of the Gomorrian’s sledgehammer blows to go home before formulating a counter-move.

Reaching out with both arms the assassin released spring-triggered armaments from the reinforced forearm plates adorning each wrist. A short blade of peculiar fluorescent metal exploded from one appendage, whilst a pistol of unusual alien design shot out from the other on a lightweight carriage.

Somehow the killer got the blade between Mortensen’s bat and her face, shearing off the tip of the titanium pipe. Like a blacksmith working metal off an anvil the major pressed on with his attack, leaning into another powerhouse pounding. This time the blade sliced the pipe in half, before flicking elegantly around to take the last of the length down to Mortensen’s feverish grip.

The major had little time to think: the advantage was fading fast and the assassin’s otherworldly pistol was coming up. Dropping the titanium stub, Mortensen threw himself down on the assassin’s arm and grabbed for the hand holding the pistol. The operative’s arm turned and twisted like a muscular snake and it was all the Gomorrian could do to keep it straight and aim the pistol out of harm’s way. In response the assassin’s blade tore through the cool air of the cavern in a devastating curve, ready to impale the major through the head. Again Mortensen came for the assassin’s face, gripping her wrist with one hand and slamming his unfeeling elbow with bone-cracking force into the killer’s collapsed face.

The blade-arm went down – at first in skull-splintered shock – and then with the intention of pushing the assassin up off the grille floor. Mortensen heard the scrape of another blade and darted his eyes around the chaos of limbs and frantic movement, attempting to anticipate another attack. Fortunately the blade was the bayonet and its wielder was Krieg, fresh from his close encounter with the wall. Snatching the weapon up in both hands the commissar leapt at the pair of them, slamming the blade down through the back of the assassin’s grasping palm and squeezing it inbetween the lattice of the mesh flooring.

A wheeze of agony escaped the assassin’s lean lips. Mortensen lay still. Krieg stared at what he’d done. Suddenly the assassin bucked, sending a spasmic ripple through her shapely body, throwing Mortensen into a roll across the platform floor. The pistol was free. Krieg shuffled and kicked back towards the wall but the major wasn’t as fortunate. He broke the roll by thumping his palms into the grille but found himself staring back up the weapon’s odd length.

Mortensen snatched his storm blade from a sheath on his armoured thigh but a metallic shimmer had reached out for him from the end of the strange weapon’s barrel, striking him in the chest before writhing across his body in divergent streams. Muscles spasmed and the storm blade clattered to the grille decking.

The strange, silver fire coursed through Mortensen’s being, burning its way through his insensitive, deadened flesh to the live nerve-shot tissue beneath. That’s when the suffering began. Everything else went black. Only the pain mattered. His brain became nothing more than a filter for the transmission of the hell he was experiencing. He thrashed like a faulty servitor, smacking his head, knees and elbows across the mesh flooring as the ethereal agony passed through the nerve-crammed muscles of his chest and thighs. It found a new expression of pain as it hit his solar plexus, throwing his abdomen off the platform and forcing his limbs to assume the tortured formation of a crab. The white-hot sensation felt like it was burrowing out of his wracked intestines like a bullet passing through his back and out through his cramping stomach.

Then it was gone. Mortensen collapsed, still clutching his abdomen. As he unscrewed his eyes he saw the assassin waving the pistol at the swiftly retreating commissar. It seemed the torturous side arm only had a short range and the assassin was still pinned to the deck. The pistol slid efficiently back along its carriage and disappeared as the operative fell to heaving at the bayonet, but the blade was stuck fast.

Krieg looked at the stranded assassin and then back at the major for instruction. He slid another length of shattered pipe from a pile of debris gathered against the wall. Mortensen shook his head as he got unsteadily to his feet. He didn’t think he could experience anything like that again.

‘Screw that,’ he blurted, throwing a finger at the struggling killer. ‘Get Qvist.’

Krieg yanked young Qvist to his feet and stumbled him across the platform to the pylon superstructure. The two of them went down as the floor dropped violently once again. The rok was really sinking now. Mortensen exchanged a venomous glance with the assassin before bounding for the structure himself.

They arrived together. Mortensen’s first priority was to get Qvist back to his senses. Belly-shot or not he needed the boy to climb. Sloshing the commander across the face with the back of his hand, the major shook the Spetzghastian awake. The boy’s head lolled to one side, his eyes rolling before falling back into unconsciousness.

‘Plan?’ the cadet-commissar put to him.

Mortensen grunted: ‘Simple. Climb for your life.’ Throwing the limp body of the Departmento Munitorum officer over one shoulder the major vaulted the distance between the platform floor and the girders. Krieg followed, after a tottering run up, hitting the pylon higher up, being slightly lighter of foot. The two men began their desperate scramble for the cavern ceiling.

Thirty metres into the gruelling ascent a dull howl caused both of the soldiers to halt, chests heaving. Looking down, they saw the assassin had given up her futile attempts to extricate the wedged bayonet. She had to. The rok was flooding badly – the steam from the raging deluge below was rising up through the grille flooring. Pulling the impaled palm to one side the assassin had slit the blade through one side of her hand – severing bone, tendon and gristle. What she was left with was a useless appendage that she bound quickly with a strip torn hastily from her body glove. Mortensen watched her assess the situation, her eyes moving around the cavern like a jungle cat’s.

The mesh flooring frosted up as floodwaters bubbled up in between. There was no way she could make the pylon now. Instead the assassin made the short run to the chamber wall and bounded up the first few metres of the rock. Incredibly the professional killer intended to scale the cavern wall and ceiling, swinging across to the pylon structure at the rim of the colossal hole in the chamber roof. Impossible ordinarily – beyond the realms of all credible likelihood with only one hand.

As the assassin shot up the wall it seemed like nothing would stop her and with Mortensen tiring under the extra weight of the Departmento Munitorum officer, he began to wonder if she had a chance. Krieg had spotted the advancing assassin also and called down to the major, who’d now completely stopped.

‘Wait there!’ Mortensen yelled, throwing himself up the aching distance separating them. Just before he reached the cadet a new phenomenon presented itself. Chemicular slush was streaming in from the roof. The rok was all but submerged now, the gargantuan mass of the craft forcing the groundwaters up and over the summit of the asteroid. Only the teleporter array, reaching up and out of the rok, still cleared the rising cryogenic swamplands. Curtains of deathworld precipitation splashed in over the brim of the roof hole, creating a circular waterfall that sprayed and dashed the pylon with droplets of chemical superfreeze.

Mortensen sagged, screwing up his face. ‘Come on!’ he bawled at his rapidly deteriorating prospects. Krieg must have thought he was talking to him because he clambered the remaining metres down to him.

‘Take the kid,’ the major ordered, passing the rag-doll body up to the struggling commissar. Krieg wasn’t squat and powerful in the way the major was and Qvist presented a serious impediment to his efforts. A frost-bitten foot hardly helped matters.

‘I’m the target?’ Mortensen confirmed, steely-eyed.

Krieg nodded gravely.

‘Then she’ll follow her target,’ the major reasoned, slipping through between the girders and launching himself across the space between two adjoining sides of the pylon interior. He felt the phantasmal shock-wave sensation of the fat teleporter beam wash across his eyeballs as his vault carried him close by. It was hard to believe that the unstoppable greenskin machinery was still operating beneath tons of liquid: a testament to alien technology, indeed.

Hanging off struts on the other side, Mortensen shot Krieg a meaningful glance. The cadet was still staring at him: an understanding passed between the two men, culminating in a silent nod from the commissar. Mortensen then watched Krieg surge purposefully for the ceiling before disappearing up through the roof. The assassin had predictably changed her course, moving rapidly across the wall of the cavern like an insect, bringing herself parallel with the major before negotiating the craggy, concave ceiling of the chamber.

Mortensen put on a final spurt – his teeth gritted, arms on fire – bringing him in line with the assassin. At that moment she blasted through the sheet of chemical death cascading in from above. She’d swung from the roof, freefalling at the pylon. She passed Mortensen, slamming onto the side of the structure with two sure feet and a firm, if frostbitten, handhold.

The assassin was like some unstoppable machine. There would be no outclimbing her. Instead of scrabbling skyward, the major let go. Using his boots to guide him along the girder he was scaling, he slid down the pylon, crushing the frozen fingers on the assassin’s remaining hand under his heel. The predatory killer fell backwards some distance before becoming tangled in a set of support struts further down.

This was his chance. Mortensen blasted up the network of bars and supports after Krieg, committing everything he had left to scaling the antenna array and putting as much distance as possible between himself and his executioner.

As he breached the roof opening Mortensen’s heart sank as he realised just how far above the rok surface the telescopic transmitter extended. What was even more worrying was the fact that he could not see the silhouettes of Krieg and Qvist above him. He’d expected to be able to pick them out clinging to the structure overhead, against the twilight of the deathworld sky. He shouldn’t have been surprised. The rok summit, and by extension the pylon, was shuddering metre by metre down into a broiling, white-water vortex of crashing deathworld brume. There wasn’t a sandy bank or piece of silicon foliage in sight.

Without warning the tower moved. It wasn’t the jolting plunge Mortensen had become used to. The pylon had never been pointing straight up, but it was generally aimed at the sky. Now the entire structure was careering wildly towards the furious chemicular riptide. Digging his fingers into the metal, the major rode out the inevitable bounce. The tower was collapsing and although the structure was holding on to its rigidity, the pinnacle was rolling violently around, picking up lethal momentum.

The assassin had returned. She was rocketing up one of the core beams, using the tips of both toes and working fingers. Her ruined hand was finding fresh usefulness with its deadly blade extended – the shimmering, otherworldly fluorescence agitated as she slashed through high tension wires and support cables.

Mortensen stopped climbing. There was nowhere left to go. The pylon was creaking uncomfortably and bouncing gently towards the foaming breakers below. The taller waves were crashing against the structure, causing both Mortensen and his executioner to keep moving back and forth along the length of the pinnacle in order to avoid instant petrification. The assassin was walking now, casually flicking the tip of her weapon at the struts and chains holding Mortensen’s section of the pylon out of the maelstrom below.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance we can work something out,’ the major bawled sardonically over the intense noise. The assassin began to pick up speed, bounding up the girder towards him, blade held ready for some exotic and lethal manoeuvre.

‘Had to ask,’ the major explained softly to himself, steeling his body for the inevitable path of the alien blade. Holding tight and closing his eyes, Mortensen shut out the drama of his surroundings and prepared for a swift and clean death. Surely he could trust an assassin to deliver that.

The ear-searing roar of a familiar engine rolled overhead, causing Mortensen to blink open his eyes and let the reality flood back in. Everything he needed to know was carved into the assassin’s snarling half-face. Vertigo. Turning, the major streaked up the remaining length of the pylon apex. As an angry breaker swept past and doused the structure behind him the Spectre was revealed, hovering over the chaos, turning gently. The bay ramp was down and a collection of figures were violently gesturing encouragement from inside. Among them was Commissar Koulick Krieg.

Mortensen didn’t dare look back. The aircraft’s door gunners were giving his assailant all kinds of hell with streams from their heavy bolters – but Mortensen had seen the daemonic character walk through worse than that. Blasting off the end of the teleporter array, legs kicking with wild effort, Mortensen sailed across the chemical death raging below.

It wasn’t pretty, but it was a landing. His chest had struck the end of the ramp awkwardly and he could swear that a couple of ribs had snapped inside his molested torso. He kicked at the slick hull of the aircraft and his fingers slapped the ramp frantically for a grip. A sea of gloved hands came at him, latching onto his carapace and fistfuls of raw flesh before pulling him unceremoniously inside.

‘Ramp closing,’ Eszcobar called across the bay, the deathworlder being first to the activation stud. The gaggle of corpsmen fell in a heap in the centre of the troop bay, Mortensen held like some kind of prize between them. The Navy gunners were still crashing at shadows outside and the aircraft swung uncomfortably above the whirlpool.

‘Sir, are you alright?’ Meeks asked urgently, suddenly beside him. When Mortensen didn’t initially reply the sergeant shook his shoulder, attempting to bring the major out of his daze. ‘Are you injured?’ he asked. He didn’t wait for an answer this time and simply yanked a harassed-looking DuBois and her medical kit away from Krieg and the unconscious Qvist. There were others too: Minghella was still unconscious and Sarakota incapacitated. Hauser was sitting in a pool of his own blood, growling in incessant pain at the far end of the compartment and a faceless Garbarsky trembled under a mask of bandages and pipes. Thule and two Guardsmen from the other squad cradled blasted limbs and head wounds. Even Rask had taken one in the gut.

‘Is he in?’ came Conklin’s gravelly voice over the bay vox-com.

‘In,’ Eszcobar confirmed.

Mortensen staggered away from DuBois’s healing hands and Meeks’s remonstrations. He felt like he just wanted to collapse, but there was something they had to do before returning to Deliverance.

He snatched the vox from the Autegan scout: ‘Rosenkrantz!’ the major called, fighting for breath. ‘Fly low. Give the bird’s belly a taste of the canopy.’

‘What the h–’

‘Just do it.’

After a moment’s hesitation the aircraft banked and accelerated, carrying them clear of the rising flood plain. Suddenly the Spectre bucked and everyone inside the compartment was thrown forward. Silicon shrubbery slammed the aircraft as Rosenkrantz guided Vertigo’s swollen belly down into the razor-sharp canopy. Leaves and branches shattered, immersing the hull in a relentless slipstream of crystal shards and glass splinters.

Everyone heard a body slam flush to the aircraft exterior and then the unearthly scream of a woman literally sliced to ribbons in an instant. Blood streamed in though through the gunner’s ports and ran across the inside of the compartment wall.

Mortensen sank down the side of the compartment wall – job done. The Gomorrian hadn’t underestimated the assassin and had been rewarded for his vigilance: he could hardly risk the deathstalker roaming the corridors of Deliverance.

The enormity of what had just happened was just beginning to sink in. Death was a constant companion on Redemption Corps missions but he’d almost been assassinated. Someone very powerful wanted him dead. His mind buzzed with a thousand possibilities.

As Rosenkrantz pulled the assault carrier out of the treetops, silence reigned once again in the troop bay. The mood was wretched, however, with blood, pain and hangdog faces sapping any sense of victory or the jubilation of survival.

‘Orders, boss?’ said Conklin who’d just appeared on the companionway, breaching the hush that had fallen across the corpsmen. Mortensen was lost in thought.

‘We need get back to Deliverance and alert the fleet to the situation,’ Krieg insisted.

‘Sir?’ Conklin persevered intently as though the commissar had never spoken.

‘The fate of this system may very well depend on what we decide to do right now,’ Krieg put to Mortensen and the compartment.

Conklin took several dangerous steps towards the commissar.

‘Do what he says,’ Mortensen interceded.

‘But boss, the ogryns, the mission was–’

‘A trap,’ Captain Rask answered for him. The officer looked empty and desolate.

‘But one that might just serve to save this system from the clutches of an alien invader,’ Mortensen assured the captain. He turned to Krieg. ‘Yes?’

A moment of cool concord passed between the two men.

‘Yes,’ the cadet-commissar answered finally.