He turned, addressing Dorran and Hurdt directly for the first time since their return. ‘No matter what they tell you of us, the so-named Traitor Legions, killing one’s brother is always hard. It gives me solace, though, knowing Jepthah’s struggle is finally over.’

  Hurdt was unable to speak. It was difficult to reconcile how such a being, reconstructed at the genetic level to be the ultimate bringer of death, could seem so human.

  It struck him, quite suddenly, that his motivations and Zelazko’s were nearly identical. Like him, the Iron Warrior had repudiated his oaths to an uncaring and ingrateful Throne, casting aside all he had been out of a love for those who fought and died beside him. Though the consul remained threatening and, ultimately, truly inhuman, his threat was tempered with an unanticipated notion of kinship.

  Hurdt glanced down at his chestplate, bare since he had the Imperialis removed.

  ‘What would you have us do?’

  The hololithic feeds around Zelazko went dark. The lights overhead flickered back to life with a series of rapid clicks, forcing the general to squint against the sudden, unexpected glare. ‘Return to the capitol building, general,’ the Iron Warrior said, stepping down from his plinth. ‘Gather your strength and prepare for a siege. This is personal for the Hundred-and-Thirty-Ninth, so have no illusions of quarter – there will be none.’

  Hurdt nodded gravely. ‘Very well, consul. Despite the overall inexperience of its personnel, the Hundred-and-Thirty-Ninth is now significantly better equipped than I am, since Pokol. I suppose I don’t need to tell you that I can barely stand up one and a half regiments?’

  ‘That will be remedied,’ Zelazko said, ‘but I need time and space to prepare. Ready the defences and soon you’ll have no concerns as far as rolling stock or ordnance are concerned.’

  ‘That’s what I like to hear,’ Hurdt said with a grin. ‘When might I expect this resupply?’

  ‘If things go to plan, you will have it within the next eight hours.’

  Dvart clattered across the tiles on her multitudinous, tiny steel feet, the ferrule of her axe tapping metronomically as she approached. ‘Where are you planning to get those supplies, Shomael?’

  ‘From Ganspur.’

  ‘Oh?’ Dvart said. ‘Have you located more equipment there that I was unaware of?’

  ‘No.’

  Dvart’s servo-arms screeched as she nervously rubbed them together, reminding Hurdt of a hideous clockwork mantis. ‘Shomael, it is unwise to tamper with the shipment earmarked for the Warsmith. The equipment is already loaded and ready, and the manifests–’

  ‘The Warsmith will have to wait.’

  ‘It is not so simple,’ Dvart said, unable to fully conceal the tremu­lousness in her voice. Hurdt wondered who this Warsmith was, to inspire such fear. ‘Having co-opted Rilisian stockage protocols, we cannot simply reallocate materiel previously earmarked for export without gubernatorial override. With the governor dead, this becomes problematic.’

  ‘Leave that to me,’ Zelazko said. ‘I have located a contingency programme. Accessed through the governor’s suites, it will enable me to override the protocols in place and deploy the assets here to Vytrum. This is why it is essential that General Hurdt secures the capital itself first.’

  ‘We are already behind schedule,’ Dvart cautioned. ‘Preparing this ordnance and materiel again for remanifesting and shipment will be exhaustively time-consuming, to say nothing of the potentially damaged or lost items we will surely incur–’

  ‘Then I will provide Felg with veteran systems!’ Zelazko roared, sending Dvart recoiling. ‘Should his shipment come out light from the battle ahead, the blooded machine spirits of the fighting vehicles he receives will provide more than adequate compensation, and he will receive half again as much with the next delivery.’

  ‘Of…’ Dvart stammered. ‘Of course.’

  Zelazko stared forward into nothing for several minutes, silent but for the grinding of his armour’s power plant.

  ‘I was too trusting, Sylera,’ he said quietly. ‘I treated this as a conventional military problem, to be solved with the simple application of military force. I trusted the Third Division could wear down the loyalist rabble through attrition. I trusted in Numus’ genius to give us comfortable breathing space at Foretrak. In my keenness to see my duty to my Warsmith done, I refused to consider employing the very weapons I was providing him against a surprisingly capable foe whom I had granted too little credit. I went into battle with one arm tied behind my back, and now my brothers have paid for my damnable hubris with their lives. No more.’

  Zelazko paced towards the shuttered grand window at the far end of the room, head downturned beneath the weight of his troubles. His confession had stripped the anger from him, cold water quenching the forge-heat of his wrath. When he spoke again, it was with hard-edged certainty.

  ‘Our brotherhood is but small, and grows smaller still with the passings of Numus and Jepthah,’ he said. ‘The only way to accomplish my task on Rilis is through the active elimination of the False Emperor’s lapdogs. Until I see that done, the Warsmith will have to wait or receive nothing.’

  Dvart clattered across the floor and laid her withered right hand on the Adeptus Astartes’ pauldron. ‘How may I assist you, Shomael?’

  Zelazko reached across his chest, taking her tiny, shrivelled hand in his massive, steel-mailed one with a tenderness Hurdt could not juxtapose with the simple purity of threat the warrior embodied. He smiled sadly at the magos with a kindness that should have been impossible on one gene-forged solely for war.

  ‘I need you to go to Ganspur,’ Zelazko said. ‘Stand by for my signal. I will go to the capital to initiate the gubernatorial override, and you will dispatch the shipment to the Vanness Tether for Hurdt’s appropriation.’

  Dvart’s hood dipped once. ‘It will be done.’

  ‘Thank you, Sylera,’ Zelazko said, releasing her hand.

  Flanked by her servitors, the magos slipped across the tiles, her axe’s ferrule tapping on the ground at regular, three-second intervals. She paused in the doorway, giving Zelazko a long look before jangling out and away on her myriad feet.

  Zelazko faced the shuttered windows, as if his gaze were some­how able to pierce them and see through to the city outside.

  ‘What do you need of the Stygians?’ Dorran asked.

  Zelazko turned. ‘Something very important.’ He walked back to the hololith, the green glow from the projector’s idling innards brightening as he approached, forming shifting data motes that floated idly in a growing sea of static. ‘Come. I will show you.’

  He tilted his head as Dorran approached, examining her pallid face with his clear amber gaze as if he might some faulty mechan­ism, laying bare any deficiencies. He turned back to the hololithic display, calling up orbital picts of the academy grounds. He tapped one, the display distorting and fizzling around his finger. The image showed the distinctive, blockily graceless form of a Valkyrie set down on the tarmac of the supply depot.

  ‘Save for Sylera’s lighter, this is the last operational aircraft in this hemisphere,’ he said. ‘It belongs to the insurgents. They will conduct an aerial assault on these headquarters to eliminate me and delay your aiding Hurdt at the capitol.’

  ‘Then we must deploy to the capitol at once,’ Dorran said.

  ‘No. They are coming for me here, and I will be at the capitol,’ Zelazko said. ‘If they arrive and find me gone, they will make for the capital immediately. Given their talent for disruption, their intervention there presents an unacceptable risk to mission requirements. Your Stygians will give them the fight they are looking for. If it improves your outlook, I very much hope that you destroy them.’

  ‘How can you be sure they will come here, and not simply support the Hundred-and-Thirty-Ninth’s passage through Vytrum?’

  ‘They will come.’

  ‘And you simply inferred their battleplan from a glance at orbital imagery before?’

  ‘Yes.’ Zelazko traced his projected flight path for the Valkyrie from the academy to the Stygians’ compound, then the 139th’s route through Vytrum to the capitol building.

  ‘Base probability and behavioural analysis, filtered through the lens of standard Imperial tactics. It’s academic, really, once you’ve seen this sort of thing often enough. I regret I hadn’t data enough on the Scions to glean before Foretrak and the academy.’

  ‘Could we have won there if you had?’

  ‘The only war that ever goes to plan is the one never fought. Though the odds are stacked firmly against them, these Scions do not seem to operate according to any normative battle standard I have ever encountered. They are unpredictable – erratic, even, finding their way to victory by whatever means.’

  ‘We outnumber them nearly four to one,’ Dorran said.

  ‘Their destruction is your secondary priority. Your primary objective is to keep them bottled up until the shipment arrives and Hurdt’s forces can claim it. After that, their eradication is assured, and we may go about our business.’

  ‘As you say.’

  ‘Expect the Scions to attack here within the next two hours. The Hundred-and-Thirty-Ninth’s attack on the capital will begin before dawn, and I require time to access the gubernatorial override. Ensure I have it.’

  The Iron Warrior departed without another word, his heavy footsteps echoing ponderously down the corridor in his wake, the tang of ozone and the heady, aromatic scent of old promethium he carried with him still lingering in the air.

  ‘I’d best not keep my people waiting,’ Hurdt said with visible elation. He nodded to Dorran. ‘Good luck, captain.’

  ‘General,’ Dorran replied, dipping her chin as Hurdt took his leave.

  Despite the urgency, Hurdt held back in the corridor outside for several minutes longer than he might have otherwise. For all the common ground he found with Zelazko, the general still had no desire to share a transport with him.

  At length, the lift doors opened, and he departed.

  THREE

  FROM FAITH COMETH HONOUR

  XVIII

  The Valkyrie swept along the arterial thoroughfares of Vytrum, slipping beneath the roofs of blocky, flat-topped structures fronted in stained white marble and the Tarantula anti-air turrets squatting atop many of them. It weaved between buildings with a grace that defied its inelegant form, its vertical thrusters allowing it to make manoeuvres that should have been impossible in such close quarters seem almost effortless.

  ‘Three minutes to objective,’ Lieutenant Sandeborn announced over the vox. An Imperial Naval officer, Sandeborn had been attached to the 36th Xian Tigers for three years and had spent the last ten months assigned to First Eradicant. He was an excellent pilot – skilful but never ostentatious, his flying style a perfect match to his no-nonsense persona. Despite routinely ferrying Tempestus Scions into some of the most perilous combat zones in the segmentum, Sandeborn’s longevity spoke to both his exceptional piloting skills and a superb sense of risk management.

  Despite this, Norroll didn’t know him at all. Sandeborn was undoubtedly an asset, but at the end of the day, he was the transport, an occasional voice over the Valkyrie’s inter-vox that gave them estimated arrival times. Despite how frequently Norroll encountered the lieutenant, he may as well have been a piece of equipment attached to the aircraft.

  Norroll looked at the door gunner across from him as the white-faced buildings outside streaked past. He realised he wasn’t even sure of the gunner’s name, or if he was in fact male or female, as the full rebreather helmet, armour and fatigues entirely obscured gender. It had never mattered.

  He looked at Traxel, sitting at the front of the troop bay, and wondered why it suddenly mattered now.

  Norroll took a heavy pull of nutri-paste from his helm’s dispenser, unnecessarily chewing the brackish glob. Long since inured to the flavour, he gulped down the nutrient-rich gunk.

  He looked at Daviland, strapped into her harness across the bay from him, motionless but for the slight bobbing of her head with the aircraft’s movements. Daviland had been unusually taciturn since she had first met with Fennech at the command centre and had said nothing to him before the commissar departed for the capital assault with the 139th. Had Norroll cared, he might have wondered why.

  None of the Scions spoke, not even Bissot, who, save for himself, was easily the most garrulous of the lot. Next to her, Durlo sat quietly, golden thronepiece stowed in one of his pockets, leaning slightly forward from the bulge of the small atomic bomb stowed in his backpack. Akraatumo, between Norroll and the Tempestor, was equally passive, as was Atebe to Norroll’s right. But for his own glances about the cabin and the swaying with the aircraft’s motion, the Scions were almost entirely inert. His time with Bissot, Durlo and Daviland had left Norroll with expectations towards their behaviour – now, battered and fatigued beyond anything any of them had ever experienced, they hardly seemed themselves.

  It reminded him of his first mission with his old Aquilon squad, years before his tenure in First Eradicant began. No talking outside of operations. No camaraderie. No personality – human automata, held idle in a trancelike state when inoperative. The Tempestors were the sole exception to this, and even they eschewed unnecessary conversation with their subordinates. It seemed natural at the time because it was natural. Fresh from their mental forging at the scholams, the Scions had not yet encountered anything to make it otherwise.

  This was what it took to get out of an eradicant, Norroll realised. Every last vestige of humanity that had slipped through the cracks in mindscaping over the years, pushed back down and locked up tightly – not eliminated, but subsumed and repurposed. The Militarum Tempestus had no need for individuals, but the cultivation of certain characteristics was essential for the next generation of Tempestors.

  Alone among the Scions, Traxel was working, using the flight time to perform maintenance on his weapons. He tightened the linkages on his chainsword, periodically revving the weapon to evaluate its function.

  ‘Everybody up.’

  The starboard door gunner opened up with his heavy bolter, raking fire across the roof of the Stygian headquarters building as the Valkyrie hove above it. The gunship released a hissing blast from its rocket pods, sending Stygians scrambling for cover as the ordnance burst across the rooftop.

  Norroll was out the moment the first rockets streaked into the defences and on the ground a split second later, firing his hellpistol into the Stygians as he dived for cover, Actis hovering along in his wake.

  Bissot was next out, gravel scattering beneath her feet as she dropped onto the roof. Levelling her volley gun as she beseeched Saint Joachim the Shootist for a portion of his immaculate accuracy, she strafed fire across the Stygian positions, before being forced into cover when the enemy displaced and returned fire.

  Two squads of ten Stygians held the rooftop, fortified cover and carapace armour rendering them inappreciably affected by the Valkyrie’s rocket barrage as they blocked the route to the access doors. They opened fire on the gunship, being sure to keep below the fusillade of heavy bolter and multi-laser fire that harried their every move. While their las-rounds had little enough effect on the aircraft, they did force Sandeborn to pivot his door gunners out of harm’s way.

  One of the Stygians shouldered a missile launcher, levelling the tube on the Valkyrie as it wheeled back around to drop the remaining Scions onto the rooftop.

  Traxel leapt from the Valkyrie’s rear ramp, firing his plasma pistol as he dropped to the rooftop. The spinning ball of supercharged gas struck the gunner in the seam between shoulder pauldron and rocket launcher, detonating the round within and spattering the rooftop in a broad arc as it obliterated the gunner above the sternum and decapitated his loader.

  The remaining Scions hit the rooftop moving, springing for cover as the Stygians rapidly recovered from the rocket launcher’s explosive demise to pour fire upon the attackers. Even with the Valkyrie’s support, the eradicant was outnumbered more than two to one and forced to defend an incrementally collapsing beachhead. The Stygians took only light casualties as they worked their way towards the Scions, shielded from the gunship’s fire by the reinforced barricades emplaced on the rooftop for the purpose of defending against such incursions.

  Unable to move forward, First Eradicant collapsed inwards behind a low plasteel bulwark, hotshot las-fire sizzling over their heads. Crawling prone across the roof, Akraatumo patched into Norroll’s connection with Actis, using his clarion vox-array to analyse the strength and disposition of the enemy through their vox transmissions as he slipped through cover. He rose to one knee, las-fire sizzling over his head, and gestured for the Scions to close on his position.

  Durlo was nearly finished emplacing the breaching charge when Norroll reached Akraatumo.

  ‘How many charges do you have left?’ Traxel asked the demolitions trooper.

  ‘Three more, plus the big one,’ Durlo reported. ‘No remotes, so it’s all manual.’ He flipped open the detonator. ‘Brace.’

  The rooftop collapsed downwards as the shaped charge exploded, opening a hole slightly over a yard square. Without urging, Bissot dropped through first, bursts of light flickering through the dust cloud from below as she cleared the space with her volley gun. Covering their escape, the rest of the eradicant slipped through the breach one by one and secured the room beneath.

  The Scions exited into the hallway behind Bissot. Norroll and Akraatumo both scanned Actis’ augur receipts, searching energy readings and vox-traffic to locate the Iron Warrior and the most efficient route to reach him.

  ‘Target?’ Traxel asked.