Norroll stamped his left foot. Grabbing the bag of blood substitute and whatever it was in the other two, he began to step around her, limping on his stiff, numb limb.

  Atebe stepped in his way, blocking him.

  He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Atebe…’ He gave her a gentle shove, knocking her off balance. He grinned stupidly, then started jogging away.

  ‘Norroll!’ Atebe called, running after him. ‘Don’t be bloody childish!’

  The door to the dining facility had been blown inwards, so Norroll charged straight in as fast as his limping gait allowed him, Atebe on his heels.

  Window glass littered the floors. The tables nearest the door had been overturned and used as cover, their laminated fibrewood surfaces chewed by las-fire. Shattered pict-viewers lay in the corners of the room, fallen on the floor or stuttering on their wall mountings. Coagulating blood streaked the terracotta tiles like tributaries leading to a broad confluence at the doorway, marking where the dead had been dragged out for cataloguing, equipment recovery and disposal.

  Traxel, Fennech and three Rilisian officers looked up from where they conferred at a dining table near the far wall, the Tempestor’s glare fixing both intruding Scions where they stood.

  ‘Forgive the interruption, Colonel Mawr,’ Traxel said stiffly, paying Atebe and Norroll no further mind. ‘Pray, continue.’

  All three officers wore heavily stained camo cloaks draped over their shoulders, tattered but still serviceable. Beneath the stains and burns on their left pauldrons, Atebe still managed to make out their unit designation, the 317th Rilisian Light. They had obviously been wearing the same stained, faded uniforms for weeks, if not months, and had darned and patched them multiple times.

  Their commander, Colonel Mawr, took a noisy slurp of steaming recaff. ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Runners, sir,’ one of his officers answered.

  ‘Runners. Right.’ He reached for the steel carafe and poured a fresh cup. ‘As I was saying, as soon as we learned of the Adeptus Astartes’ presence, I sent runners to contact Zheev’s regiment. Apparently, none of them made it.’

  ‘When was that, colonel?’ Fennech asked.

  ‘Not long after we got here. Maybe two, two and a half months ago?’

  ‘They were still developing the fortress’ defence system,’ one of the other officers added. He was a spare man with dark, bloodshot eyes and a thin ring of grey stubble above his ears. ‘Seems to enjoy putting his personal touches on the setup. Walks around the perimeter when the spirit moves him, just taking it all in. That chaincannon of his, plus the four gun servitors in his orbit, keep us at a distance.’

  ‘How many other Space Marines have you noted?’ Traxel asked.

  ‘Two others,’ Mawr answered. ‘But only the one with the chaincannon is always here. The others come and go. There’s also one with a lascannon he carries around on some kind of servo-rig.’

  ‘He’s the one who seems to be in charge,’ the other officer added. ‘Chaingunner steps to when he’s visiting and escorts him around.’

  ‘There’s also…’ Mawr took a loud swig of recaff and gulped it down. ‘There’s another one.’ He licked his lips nervously, apparently unwilling to elaborate.

  ‘The twisted one,’ Fennech said.

  Mawr nodded. He fished around in the breast pocket of his greatcoat until the third officer offered him a bag of tabac and lho paper.

  ‘Forgive me, colonel, but why would you need to send runners to notify Colonel Zheev’s regiment?’ Atebe asked.

  ‘No signals get in or out of the Gap,’ Mawr replied. He sucked in another steaming mouthful of recaff with a hissing slurp, apparently indifferent to its heat.

  ‘Why not?’ Traxel asked.

  ‘Some system the Adeptus Astartes has,’ Mawr said. ‘Seems it’s part signal array, part air defence network, run from the main fortress. It consists of three mast towers, laid out equilaterally around the Gap. It’s shut down all overflight around the capital region, and the only signals that get in or out are the ones he wants. Like us. We can’t get out. Neither can you, now that you’re in.’

  ‘No?’ Fennech asked.

  ‘Letting you escape would ruin his fun.’

  ‘With the garrison eliminated–’ Traxel began.

  ‘He never needed the garrison to defend the Gap, Traxel – automated turrets and traps do most of the work for him. And it gets worse the closer you get to the fortress.’

  ‘You and your men have managed to survive,’ Fennech said.

  Mawr flicked his lho-stick across the room and rose with a grunt. ‘Follow me.’

  Daviland kept watch over Akraatumo and Quisse as the eradicant followed Mawr back down the mountain the way they had come, cautiously making their way past destroyed sentry turrets and reduced obstacles. The journey down the ridge took considerably less time and blood than had the way up – the tang of burned plastek and ozone still lingered about the wrecked Tarantulas.

  They slogged through sucking, ankle-deep mud, the ground soaked by water seeping from a nearby spring, quickly obscuring any hint of passage. A small rusty pool lay at the valley’s edge, its surface faintly disturbed by the water that continually bubbled into it from the spring below.

  Mawr stopped at the pool’s edge and looked back. ‘Good thing it’s summer,’ he said. ‘It was considerably colder when I found this place.’ Taking a deep breath, he plunged into the water.

  He bobbed back to the surface. ‘Come in, and stay close,’ he spluttered.

  Norroll waded in first, followed by Traxel and the others. Daviland came last, following Akraatumo and Quisse to ensure they didn’t get misdirected under the water.

  Daviland broke the surface in a cavern beneath the ridge. The Scions had already activated the monoscopes mounted to their left shoulders, sending narrow beams of light spearing through the darkness.

  ‘Keep moving forward, so the rest can get through,’ Mawr said. His voice betrayed the barest hint of a shudder, soaked through as he was with cold water and standing in the eternal chill that reigned beneath the mountain.

  They made the journey in relative silence. The route was not direct, nor could it simply be walked. They wended through caverns, often having to remove their backpacks to squeeze between tight gaps, or along narrow tunnels scraped and scoured by the passage of flak armour. Daviland wondered just how Mawr had ever managed to find a way through the meandering warren of caves, or how he came to discover them in the first place.

  She had been in caves before, but never anything on this scale. It was another world, lightless and completely alien from the one they had left. Despite the oppressive darkness, the caverns were far from silent – the network lived, grew and breathed all around them.

  ‘Lights out,’ Mawr whispered. ‘We’re here.’

  The Scions’ monoscopes went dark, leaving the Imperial force submerged in tenebrous gloom.

  They picked their way forward, following the path by a faint glow that grew steadily as they moved towards it.

  The light came from another small pool near the cave wall. It radiated from beneath the stone itself, reflecting on the slight ripples undulating across the surface.

  ‘End of the line,’ Mawr said. ‘You’ll never know how glad I was when I first found this place. I’d been wandering around down here for days.’

  They exited the cave network in much the same way as they had entered, through a small, spring-fed pond on the opposite side. The mid-afternoon sun glared overhead, dazzling in its brilliance. Daviland squinted, momentarily blinded, before clearing a path for the Rilisian troopers behind her. She crawled from the spring and up a bank of damp ochre clay onto the flat valley floor. As they left the pool, Daviland realised there was no other cover – the entire valley, and the ridge beyond, had been scoured of vegetation. Away from the spring, they low-crawled across a lifeless flat, baked powder-dry by the summer’s heat.

  On the one hand, such exposure made the area’s defence systems and fortifications terribly obvious; unfortunately, it left the Imperials reliant upon the very systems built by the enemy for cover. Here, the bastions seemed more of a lure now than ever. The loyalists were entirely unprotected, easy targets for whatever defences screened their advance through the Space Marine’s killing fields.

  Mawr’s command squad crawled past the Scions, joining their commander at the front of a formation that crept like an oil stain across the bare valley floor.

  ‘Be ready to move,’ Mawr whispered. ‘Clear the trench line and head east, up the mountain. There are gun mounts on the far side. We’ll cover you.’

  Norroll had released Actis, the servo-skull hovering just above the recon trooper’s left ear as he crawled forward. He pointed at an area on his vambrace slate, where Actis’ augurs painted a rough framework of the enemy’s near defences.

  Traxel nodded, sending Norroll and Durlo forward.

  Norroll’s augur reads populated across the Scions’ slates monitron. He followed up with a message, his assessment scrolling across their vambraces in blocks of green runes.

  This is going to be ugly.

  The thunder of heavy bolter emplacements began within seconds of the first fire team beginning its ascent.

  VIII

  ‘Recognise the enemy’s cravenness as he cowers behind his walls and automata!’ Fennech’s powerful voice carried across the vox. ‘Neither will protect him, for we bring the Emperor’s judgement!’

  The ascent through the Foretrak defences had become a blur of fire, dust and smoke, punctuated by exploding ordnance and the shrieks of rent metal. Daviland scarcely noted the pain and weariness that seemed to throb across every nerve, or the blood soaking through her fatigues on her left thigh and bicep.

  First Eradicant had left Mawr’s beleaguered regiment behind below, not far above the valley’s edge. The Guardsmen had intended to draw the enemy’s fire from the Scions and had done so admirably.

  Through bone-deep pain and fatigue, the commissar’s exhortations drove them forward. His rhetoric unlocked a myriad of deeply ingrained prompts within their psyches and dragged them to the fore, pushing the Scions beyond fear and pain.

  Whether they liked it or not, Tempestus Scions always gave their best when working alongside a commissar, their natural fortitude and skill amplified by the fervour of the black-coated morale officers’ bombastic proclamations. Even Traxel fought harder for Fennech’s rallying cries, his zeal magnified by deeply engrained psychological conditioning.

  Akraatumo dragged Daviland free of a reinforced breastwork, hurling her to the ground and dropping next to her as heavy bolter shells sizzled through the air scant inches above them. The hissing rush and whoomp of Rybak’s plasma gun from below stilled the turret and the two sprang forward, dodging across an open field. Akraatumo primed his last frag grenade, tossing it through the gun slit of a bare plascrete pillbox as the assault cannon within spooled up. The explosion stilled the turret, and he and Daviland ducked inside.

  ‘Wrath is your fortitude!’ Fennech’s voice boomed above the din.

  Daviland risked a glance at her wrist, checking the eradicants’ vitals as they scrolled across the medi-slate on her left vambrace. Their massively accelerated respiratory rates were to be expected and did not concern her. She looked for exceptions to the uniformly high heart rates. She had already treated both Bissot and Phed on the way up, patching wounds they had sustained during the advance, though again their carapace armour had taken the worst of the damage. Akraatumo, one of her primary concerns, was holding up remarkably well, as was Norroll – it seemed their near-fatal experiences at the garrison had done much to dislodge the sense of invulnerability brought on by the vitalotox.

  Quisse, on the other hand, was a concern. There was an irregularity to his vitals, and his injuries had notably slowed his reaction times, exposing him to a greater volume of fire than the others. Twice, she had risked heavy fire to inject the battered Scion with cocktails of stimms and pain balms, as a second dose of vitalotox could prove detrimental in his state. Though he was struggling, he assured her he was still in the fight.

  For her concern, Daviland had been knocked off her feet by a direct hit to her cuirass from a heavy bolter shell.

  ‘Endure, as the Emperor has endured these ten thousand years!’ Fennech bellowed as his power fist shredded the support struts of an automated gun platform. ‘Next to His, your pain is as nothing!’

  Daviland sprang to her feet, compartmentalising the pain as she sprinted forward. The commissar’s exhortations drove her up and onwards, much as they had when she had first met him.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Akraatumo said, bent double as he bolted out of the bunker. He was almost immediately greeted by a salvo of heavy bolter fire. He dropped to his knee and fired, high-powered las-rounds boring into the Tarantula’s featureless frontal glacis.

  Daviland added her fire to his and the turret went inert. They were close – Norroll’s marker flashed on the cracked crystalflex of her vambrace display. Over the next rise, and they would be at the edge of the fortress itself.

  She set her last grenade for impact detonation and primed it, casting it at another sentry gun emplacement to her right. The heavy bolter turret burst in a plume of oily black smoke and shrapnel, its guns stilled at once as Daviland and Akraatumo vaulted into the fortified trench that ran along the outside of the fortress’ western perimeter wall. They crawled along the bottom, through standing puddles of rank ochre mud, their surfaces dancing with oily rainbow slicks. Turret fire ineffectually strafed several feet above their heads, their automated systems firing blind at the Scions’ last observed location.

  ‘Why put in a defensive trench around the perimeter of a fortress wall?’ Akraatumo mused, shouting over the massed turret fire.

  ‘Last ditch for troops defending the bastion?’ Daviland suggested.

  ‘Or a reward for attackers who made it this far,’ Norroll said, breaking into their conversation. ‘It’s like he wants us to make it inside.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Daviland said. ‘Why would he allow that?’

  ‘Boredom?’ Norroll suggested.

  Akraatumo dragged himself through puddles of stinking mud as chunks of dirt rained down on them. ‘Since when does anything the Archenemy does have to make sense, Salenna?’

  Daviland had no answer.

  Ahead, Bissot sat with her back against the rust-red iron of the bastion wall, screwing a replacement barrel onto her overheated volley gun. The rest of the Scions huddled along a twenty-five-yard stretch of trench line, dispersed so a single attack had less chance of killing them all. At the centre, Durlo mag-clamped a constellation of krak- and melta-charges to the wall’s surface.

  ‘We’re rats in a maze to him,’ Norroll said as Daviland and Akraatumo approached. ‘He monitors us, watches what we do, measures our reactions, our responses. He’s choreographed our entire assault, pulled our strings and watched how we danced the whole way.’

  ‘He won’t find us wanting,’ Fennech pronounced. ‘He will rue the day he sought to test the might of the Militarum Tempestus.’

  ‘Fall back to minimum safe range,’ Durlo called. ‘Breach on my signal.’

  The Scions complied, wordlessly peeling away from either side of the cluster of explosives that lay affixed to the iron-faced parapet.

  ‘Breach!’ Durlo called.

  The moment they were clear, Durlo blew the charges. The central melta mine reduced the reinforced wall in an instant, near-solar temperatures rendering it to slag as the surrounding shaped charges ruptured it. The wall burst inwards, spearing white-hot iron into the space beyond.

  The Xian Tigers plunged through the gap and into the darkness on the other side, charging through molten metal and the shattered wall of rockcrete that lay beneath it. Bissot and Rybak cleared both sides of the breach, sweeping the interior area as the other Scions pushed past them.

  They stood in a narrow, curving corridor. The lights at their entry point had been blown out by the breaching explosion, the wall opposite scoured and pocked by shards of glowing plasteel and rockcrete. Lumen strips on either side of the opening dangled from the ceiling for several yards, flickering intermittently amidst the sparks arcing from their power cables.

  The corridor itself was circular, its curvature obscuring what might lie beyond. The floor was covered in square tiles of ­mottled dark green laminate, their placement periodically broken by black tiles at regular intervals. Lengths of conduit ran in tightly bunched assemblies along the corners of the ceilings and floors, ranging from thickly insulated pipes to thin tubes of black enamelled steel. The reinforced rockcrete walls were painted a pale aqua green and generally unadorned, save for the yellow warning signs and white directional placards which provided their guidance in square black runes. According to the nearest, they were in the section of the corridor designated 2-Delta.

  There were no visible defences along the passageway, giving the Scions a moment to take a knee and recover somewhat. Bissot and Rybak covered either end of the eradicant, providing security for their squadmates as Daviland moved among the Scions, paying particular attention to Norroll, Akraatumo and Quisse.

  Daviland approached Norroll as he released Actis to scout ahead.

  ‘What are your augurs reading?’ Traxel asked, following her.

  ‘We seem to have a reprieve for as long as we stay here, or until somebody comes for us,’ Norroll said. A map scrolled across his vambrace as the servo-skull scanned and logged everything along its route. ‘This looks like the outermost ring of some kind of shelter. Actis is sweeping the whole level and should be coming up behind us shortly. There are junctions and compartments along the inside, towards the centre. No discernible defences.’

  ‘He’s waiting for us to catch our breath,’ Fennech said mildly. A long, shallow gash marred his cheek beneath his right eye, already black with clotted blood and dirt. His carapace armour and refractor field had shielded him from the worst of the damage outside. Despite slogging through the mud and blood with the rest of them, the commissar’s leather greatcoat and boots somehow still maintained their shine.