Norroll found Traxel and Fennech in calm discussion at the far edge of the vortex crater. Akraatumo had joined them, the vox-operator taking his position by his Tempestor’s side, speaking into his unit. He shook his head and gave Traxel the handset.

  Traxel stood emotionless and expressionless as Norroll approached, his chainsword sheathed and plasma pistol holstered. He listened to the handset, saying nothing. When the transmission concluded, he handed the field phone back to Akraatumo. Facing south, he stared forward, gaze flat and expression inert as he entered a micro-trance.

  Norroll considered doing the same but reconsidered. From the south, a chorus of throttling promethium engines rumbled, growing louder by the moment as they approached the ruins of the maintenance depot. The mechanised column ground forward before a billowing cloud of dust, the clanking tracks and chugging exhaust of the regiment’s approach echoing hollowly from the remaining, ruined maintenance bays to fill up the area. They moved at full speed, a formation of Chimeras in the flat ochre paint scheme of the Rilisian forces, crashing through debris, shouldering aside containers and battering through collapsing walls in their haste.

  The Chimera at the head of the formation ground to a halt ten yards away. Heat haze shimmered above the vehicle as Lieutenant Colonel Sarring stormed from its rear hatch, shoulders squared and head thrust forward. Her gait was rapid, though she stifled a limp.

  ‘God-Emperor damn you, Traxel!’ she snarled, spittle flying from her lips. She brandished an accusatory finger at the Tempestor. ‘Who in the hells do you think you are?’

  Traxel did not answer.

  ‘How many more of my people have to die for your victory?’ Sarring spat. ‘You lost us the Pokol Armoury and a full company from Attack Battalion. We took heavy casualties taking it back, and the traitors were able to break contact and escape back into Vytrum!’

  Though she was considerably shorter than Traxel, her eyeline level with the Tempestor’s clavicle, she stood inches from him, her gaze boring hatefully into the haggard, vacant mask of his face. She flung her arm out to the side, gesturing to the eerily precise crater behind her. ‘And now you’ve wiped our regimental commander and the rest of Attack Battalion out of existence, you son of a bitch! What next?’

  Traxel appeared utterly unmoved by her distress, if indeed it registered in him at all.

  ‘Your orders were to secure Pokol Armoury!’ she shouted, her voice on the edge of breaking. Several of Attack Battalion’s survivors looked up at Sarring’s outburst. ‘And you,’ she said, pointing to Fennech. ‘You’re no better. Where was the Officio Prefectus’ vaunted discipline when a rogue element was introduced to the senior ground force commander’s battleplan?’

  ‘My orders, received via my Tempestor-Prime from Lord General Trenchard, were to secure this world by whatever means necessary, colonel,’ Traxel said. ‘Securing Pokol Armoury was immaterial to those orders, and Commissar Fennech concurred with my assessment. Once we learned of the Archenemy’s involvement with the traitors, the extermination of these Heretic Astartes became our singular priority. Their elimination cuts the head from this rebellion.’

  Sarring closed her eyes, calming herself with a long, shuddering breath. When she opened them again, she had regained a modicum of control. ‘Given your track record since you made planetfall, I’m beginning to wonder which side of this conflict you’re on.’

  ‘My service is to the God-Emperor alone.’

  ‘I’m sure He finds your methods unimpeachable,’ Sarring said bitterly.

  ‘Be careful, Colonel Sarring,’ Fennech cautioned.

  ‘Was the immolation of Attack Battalion worth it?’ she demanded. ‘Was Colonel Zheev’s?’

  ‘Colonel Zheev’s sacrifice has ensured the destruction of a far greater threat,’ Traxel said. ‘We have destroyed two of the three Iron Warriors on this planet, colonel, yet that does not seem to enter into your calculus of victory.’

  ‘What good is a victory if there are no victors?’

  ‘Take such questions up with the Inquisition when it arrives, colonel, and rest assured it will,’ Traxel said. ‘The lives of the soldiers who fought here were forfeit the moment they laid eyes upon that accursed Iron Warrior. You are fortunate that you did not arrive with them, or you would join them on the pyre.’

  Sarring gaped, the inhuman callousness of Traxel’s words striking her like a visceral blow. Her lips drew back in disgust, trembling over her bared teeth. ‘Throne of Terra, what is wrong with you?’

  ‘I would ask the same of one so overwrought,’ Traxel said. ‘How can this whingeing possibly serve the martyrs here?’

  Sarring drew her laspistol and took aim at Traxel’s face in a single, rapid movement. ‘Whingeing?’ she hissed, tears flowing down her cheeks. ‘You call this whingeing? You bastard!’

  Fennech’s bolt pistol was up equally fast, its barrel level with Sarring’s head. ‘Lower your weapon, Colonel Sarring,’ he commanded.

  Sarring glanced between the Tempestor’s dead-eyed gaze and the commissar’s balefully cold one. Her expression transitioned from shock, to disbelief, and finally to resignation in the span of a few heartbeats.

  ‘I wonder if this was what it was like for the Enth veterans, when the Fire Angels brought Oranesca Hive tumbling down around their ears,’ Sarring said.

  Fennech’s bolt pistol struck Sarring’s face with a furious crack, sending the officer crashing to the ground.

  The commissar kept his sights levelled on Sarring’s forehead as she struggled to sit up. ‘You walk perilously close to apostasy, colonel.’

  Sarring glared hatefully up at him, blood streaming from her lacerated right cheek. With a defiance that Norroll found strangely admirable, she retrieved her laspistol from the ground and holstered it.

  ‘Hold to your faith in the God-Emperor,’ Fennech said down the length of his bolt pistol. ‘He has abandoned neither Rilis nor you.’

  Sarring wiped her bloodied face with a filthy, gloved palm as she rose. She looked out over the battered survivors of Attack Battalion, now consigned to death for whatever horrors they might have witnessed, and flexed her tightly clenched jaw. ‘You can lower that now, commissar, if you please. I’ve had my fill of blasphemy for the day.’

  With a nod, Fennech lowered his bolt pistol, though he did not holster it.

  ‘So,’ Sarring sighed. ‘Where do we go from here?’

  Deliberations began almost immediately.

  Through dint of seniority, Sarring succeeded Colonel Zheev as Rilisian senior ground forces commander, a position she had never expected nor ever desired to hold. As planning for the oper­ation continued, she found herself wishing more and more for the slow, sheepish grin that inevitably revealed itself from beneath the mantle of Zheev’s frequent admonishments. She very much needed advice from her old mentor and commander.

  Fennech held his bolt pistol at the ready, prepared to intercede should the two loyalist commanders become violent. Beyond the commissar’s punitive threat, though, he proved invaluable in developing the tactical framework of an operation spanning two separate fronts.

  Despite his striking her earlier, Sarring had released much of her rancour towards Fennech – she had let her emotions get the better of her, and in so doing wandered perilously close to heresy. That he had not executed her on the spot for such a transgression communicated volumes. Sarring found the venerable commissar patient, perhaps even charming, in an old-fashioned sort of way. He seemed to observe everything with that one icy-blue eye of his. Sarring noted more than once how his grip on his bolt pistol instinctively tightened when she raised her voice or her bearing became too aggressive, so she adjusted her demeanour accordingly.

  She noticed that Fennech focused more upon her behaviour than upon Traxel’s, likely because there was no real sense of anything from the Tempestor. Sarring had seen servitors with more personality than the eradicant’s commander. He barely seemed to move, scarcely blinking as he delivered his recommendations and suggestions with a dispassion that appeared more mechanically scripted than developed by a human mind. The Scions flanking him, Akraatumo and Norroll, were similarly passionlessly inert – automata attending a senior construct until commanded otherwise.

  There was significant contempt for the Ordo Tempestus amongst the Astra Militarum’s rank and file, and Sarring was beginning to understand why. She had never interacted with any Scions she had shared the battlefield with before now. While Sarring had never met, or even seen, one of the Adeptus Astartes, she wondered whether she might find more humanity beating within the twin hearts of one of the Emperor’s Angels of Death than she found amongst the Scions of First Eradicant.

  Sarring’s surviving cadre of officers and sergeants, along with the remaining seven Tempestus Scions and Fennech, clustered around a hasty sand table constructed by a pair of Sarring’s Guardsmen, once surveyors in the capital before they had been pressed back into the Emperor’s service. They had created the schematic from memory, using the abundance of scrap and rubble to build a crude but illustrative layout of Vytrum’s city centre.

  ‘Where is our Valkyrie?’ Traxel asked Akraatumo.

  ‘En route, sir. Estimated arrival time, ten minutes.’

  Traxel nodded. ‘That lets us hit them first and keep the Stygians off your backs while you drive into the city centre and get stuck in,’ he told Sarring.

  ‘What of the Iron Warrior?’ Norroll asked, suddenly animated from his apparent torpor. ‘We’ve been discussing ingress plans and order of battle, but we seem to be skirting around the main issue.’

  ‘Our most recent intelligence placed him at the Stygian compound,’ Sarring said. Using a length of antenna, one of her surveyors indicated the Chimera transmission used to represent the location. ‘Given the challenge posed by the other two Traitor legionaries, I am granting First Eradicant specialised explosives to reduce the facility and bring the compound down around his head. Once you locate him, set the charge and get out before it goes off – you absolutely do not want to be in the vicinity when it detonates. On the extremely limited chance it doesn’t kill him outright, it should certainly soften him up enough to make finishing him easier.’

  ‘What type of charge will we be using, colonel?’ asked Durlo, the Scion in the battered demolition oversuit who had been fidgeting with a gold coin the entire briefing.

  ‘Godshaker Type-238 with a three-kilo warhead.’

  The coin rolling across Durlo’s knuckles stopped moving. ‘We’re to employ a tactical atomic weapon in your own capital city?’

  ‘Do you want this bastard dead or not?’

  Durlo shrugged. He scratched thoughtfully at the dark stubble on his chin, glancing to Traxel and Fennech before looking back to Sarring. ‘And you are authorised to employ this weapon?’

  ‘In the absence of the planetary governor or the planetary congress, as Rilisian senior ground forces commander, I can authorise pretty much whatever the hell I want.’

  The gold coin pinged into the air.

  ‘If you’re certain, colonel,’ Durlo said, snatching the coin. ‘You can’t put it back in the box once it’s out.’

  Sarring didn’t reply immediately. A Tempestus Scion, of all people, was reminding her of the gravity of her decision.

  Durlo’s question left her an open door. She had as much authority to call off such a dreadful attack on her own soil as she had to authorise it. The Scion was quite right – whatever else happened, once they detonated such a weapon, there was no going back. History would recall her as the first commander to order an atomic strike on a Rilisian city area since the days before the Imperium.

  Then the hatred roiled back, sweeping in and dragging her down beneath its black and bitter tide. Hatred for the traitors who had ruined her world and taken her family from her. Hatred no less stark for those weak-kneed bureaucrats who refused to recognise Hurdt’s rebellion for what it was before it was too late to stop it. Hatred for the damnable Fire Angels who had driven Hurdt and his traitors into treachery on Enth, and for the Iron Warriors who had found and succoured them afterwards.

  Hatred for all the failures which brought First Eradicant to her world.

  Her innards shook. She wished that she could scream.

  Durlo regarded her with a curious expression, his head cocked slightly to the side.

  ‘Colonel Sarring?’ the Scion asked.

  She cleared her throat and nodded, if only to herself.

  If history was to remember her as the one who consigned her capital city to the fire, so be it.

  ‘I’m certain.’

  XVII

  Hurdt’s gloves creaked as he flexed his fingers behind his back. They had been waiting for hours now. He was no longer a young man, and age and battle injuries made standing for long periods of time difficult. Despite this, he ground his teeth, flexed his fingers and fought to keep still.

  He would never dream of exposing weakness in front of Zelazko. As Hurdt understood it, the Canticle of Iron, the ancient maxim of the consul’s Legion, had no tolerance for infirmity, and Hurdt had no desire to discover what would happen when the iron within him became the iron without him.

  Zelazko yet stood in the centre of the hololith, seemingly held fast within a scrolling green cage of continuously updating inventories, catalogues, indices and shipping dockets received from Ganspur. Hurdt wondered if he had simply been standing there since before yesterday, his ravenous amber eyes devouring every morsel of information as fast as it could be fed to him. But for the periodic, strobing brilliance of Dvart’s welding across the room, the hololith was the sole source of illumination, bathing everything in its dim green glow. Never still, Zelazko followed the data, randomly turning left and right in a slow circuit about the hololithic dais as new information caught his scrutiny.

  The Adeptus Astartes had not acknowledged Hurdt or Dorran when they returned, the entirety of his focus apparently bent on ensuring the shipments of war materiel would be ready for transit to his Warsmith. It was worse, in a way – while failure was always deplorable, Hurdt had learned early on that reporting failure had a purgative effect on the negative emotions surrounding the event. The longer he went without communicating it, the more the animus remained, twisting in his guts like steam in an unregulated pipe until it threatened to burst from him.

  Beside him, Captain Dorran swayed slightly, hands behind her back. She periodically flexed her knees and shifted her weight between her feet. Her mutations seemed to have left her in a state of perpetual discomfort, though like Hurdt she bore it stoically. Hurdt occasionally heard the Stygian’s breath catch in her throat when Zelazko turned towards them, though it seemed the Iron Warrior’s position was merely incidental – his attention drawn in their direction by another data stream.

  Dvart toiled, a darker shadow in the slightly green-tinged darkness flanked by servitors, her hunched, shrouded form occasionally backlit by the halcyon bright flare of her welder as it crackled over inscrutable labours.

  Orbital pict feeds flickered into being about the Iron Warrior, most focused on the academy grounds, though some carried imagery of the Foretrak Gap. Hurdt noticed something moving across the feeds as the satellite’s pict aperture zoomed in on the blocky outline of an aircraft. Indicators surrounding the craft flashed red, highlighting the unmistakable silhouette of a Valkyrie.

  Hurdt closed his eyes and took a deep breath, mustering the courage to speak. Reporting failure was never easy, and reporting failure to one such as Zelazko was unknown territory. Another of the Iron Warrior’s brothers had fallen, and Hurdt recalled Zelazko’s childish rage when he learned of Blodt’s death. The sheer terror at being so close to such an extraordinary display of violence was still too fresh, too real, to the general.

  He subvocally modulated his voice as he prepared to speak – an old mnemonic he had learned early in his career to keep from sounding nervous during briefings – and began as naturally as he could manage.

  ‘Consul?’ Hurdt began.

  ‘General,’ Zelazko said in his deep, sonorous bass, his back still to them. ‘I was beginning to wonder if you had forgotten how to speak.’

  ‘The operation to eliminate the Scions and Zheev was unsuccessful,’ Hurdt reported. It was easier to admit than he had expected, and with the catharsis of speaking it aloud, he felt the failure’s maddening pressure begin to bleed off.

  ‘I knew that the moment they employed the Deathstrike,’ Zelazko said. ‘Hoisted with my own petard, it seems. I hope you can forgive me.’

  ‘Forgive you?’ Hurdt said, perplexed. ‘So, you aren’t angry?’

  Dorran gaped at him, eyes bulging.

  ‘You ask why I have not killed you in a rage for bringing me ill news?’ Zelazko folded his hands behind his back. ‘I regret that rash display – it was childish and unseemly of me. Understand, Numus was my closest friend, even before our Legion shrugged off the cruel yoke of a thankless Emperor. I fear my immediate grief over my brother’s death resulted in shameful overreaction on my part.’

  Hurdt nodded. He had not expected the Iron Warrior to reply with such candour. ‘The question stands.’

  ‘Not angry,’ Zelazko mused. ‘Dismayed, perhaps. Once they secured the Deathstrike, there was really no way you could have hoped to succeed.’

  He sighed, a curiously human sound, coming from an Angel. ‘It is true, I was overwrought by Numus’ death,’ Zelazko admitted. ‘But Jepthah’s is probably for the best. He had been losing his battle with the daemon in his blade for years, and I had determined long ago that I would put him down before it claimed him entirely. I delayed, as one does – ever dauntless, never defeated, Jepthah had been our Grand Battalion’s Champion. And he was my brother…’ He trailed off, somehow seeming to sag beneath his armour. ‘I suppose I held on to the vain hope he would overcome this foe, as he had all the others, and ultimately triumph.’