Ezl went slack, hissing out a long breath. His spasmodic twitching subsided as quickly as it had struck. Daviland pressed the syringe into Ezl’s artery.

  Without warning, Ezl snatched Daviland’s wrist with his blood-soaked left hand. Twisting her arm away, he fixed her with a fierce glare. ‘How much of that are you planning to waste on me?’ he snarled, before coughing a stream of red-brown bile from his mouth.

  Traxel waved Daviland off.

  Ezl nodded his thanks. ‘I split the squad. Kept half of us with the Taurox, shoring up a weak point in the Imperial line here. The other half went south, under Commissar Fennech.’ He spat, at the same time trying unsuccessfully to push his intestines back in through the gash in his belly. ‘Resistance was heavy, but enemy capabilities in the area were light. Seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  Traxel visibly tensed at the mention of the commissar’s name. ‘Where is Fennech now?’ he asked.

  ‘Continuing his assessments.’ Ezl shrugged weakly. ‘Almost half of my Scions survived eradicant detail before they came to me, so those are the ones I sent with him. With you already deployed when he got to Sindral-Beta, and Second and Third Eradicants destroyed, it seems he decided my squad was the next best option.’

  ‘My sympathies.’

  ‘As to where he is…’ Ezl spat a wad of bloody phlegm into the dust. ‘No idea. Too far out of range for slates or intra-squad vox. We lost clarion when Rale died. We were on our way to link up with Fennech and the others when the artillery started falling. We buttoned up behind an earthwork, hoping to ride it out. Mad bastards assaulted us through the barrage!’

  He slumped back limply, breath wheezing out between his lips.

  ‘Twenty yards!’ Norroll shouted.

  Traxel rose, chainsword revving as he adjusted the throttle.

  Ezl fixed Traxel with his feverish gaze. ‘Find the loyalists and you’ll find my squad. Find them, though, and you find Fennech.’

  ‘Tempestor Ezl,’ Daviland said, withdrawing her reductor pistol from its holster, ‘do you desire the Emperor’s Peace?’

  Exhaling, the wounded Tempestor seemed to deflate. With eager eyes and a wan smile, Ezl nodded weakly. ‘Now you can use your kit on me, Daviland.’ He looked up at Traxel. ‘Been an honour,’ he said.

  ‘Emperor light your way, Tempestor,’ Traxel replied. ‘The honour’s been mine.’

  Daviland removed Ezl’s helmet and pressed the reductor pistol to the Tempestor’s left temple.

  ‘If you’re lucky,’ Ezl wheezed, ‘Fennech’s already dead.’

  Daviland fired, driving a heavy-gauge piston through Tempestor Ezl’s skull with enough force to liquify his brain, killing him instantly.

  ‘I’ve never been that lucky.’

  II

  Daviland holstered her reductor pistol and sealed her medi-kit before unslinging her lasgun. Beside her, Traxel took a step closer to Norroll. There was no need for orders. What came next was ingrained at the core of each of them, honed to muscle memory by decades of training and reinforced by unshakeable hypnotic conditioning, until it was as reflexive as breathing.

  At ten yards, the first hint of the approaching infantry appeared, indistinct phantoms in the umber fog. As soon as they were visible, Bissot opened fire, roiling the smoke as her hotshot volley gun tore into the formation’s front.

  ‘Taurox moving. Clear zero to one eighty fore. Mark,’ Replendus voxed.

  Daviland and Bissot moved away from the personnel ­carrier’s front as Norroll and Traxel withdrew from its rear, both pairs repositioning on either side of the Taurox as Replendus pivot-steered right to face the enemy. Tempestor Ezl’s remains slumped to the ground, rolling back to face the sky as his corpse collapsed into the divot left by the right rear track.

  The Taurox pivoted back and forth, grinding Ezl’s remains into the dirt as the twinned hotshot volley guns mounted to either side of the vehicle strafed the enemy, sending the troopers diving for whatever meagre cover they could find. The turret traversed, swinging in the opposite direction. With a shrieking whine, the twin six-barrelled cannons spun up and vomited fire, scything down nearly a dozen traitors.

  Durlo’s voice crackled across the squad vox. ‘Taurox weapons function check complete.’

  Bissot whooped above the roar of her hotshot volley gun, cutting down enemy troopers as they fled the Taurox’s blistering firepower. Fed by the capacitor she wore on her back, her weapon could fire nearly three hundred rounds without need of a recharge, and countless hours spent on practice ranges and the battlefield had honed her skills to ensure she made the most of every shot. Desperate for cover, the traitors received no respite.

  The Taurox continued moving, its guns sweeping across the Guardsmen, pummelling them as they sought to flee. Left, and they escaped into Bissot’s line of fire; right, into Traxel’s and Norroll’s blades.

  To Bissot’s rear, Daviland fired her lasgun more selectively, picking off any survivors that managed to escape the enfilade they had unwittingly stumbled into. Though her hellgun’s ammunition capacity equalled Bissot’s, the weapon was unable to match the volley gun’s rate of fire.

  Bissot raked shots over the troopers who had fallen to the ground. A las-round struck her in the upper right of her chest plastron, staggering her slightly and disrupting her merciless sweep.

  With an irritated grunt, Bissot opened fire again, irritably singing a psalm. Daviland had learned that it was her equivalent to cursing.

  ‘My refuge and my fortress,

  God-Emperor, my soul entrust,

  He calls on me, and I shall answer,

  In wrath I grind His foes to dust.’

  What began as a massed assault of thirty enemy troopers swiftly degenerated into a panicked rout, and the eradicant gave no quarter. Their weapons blazed as they culled the traitors who had already begun to retreat.

  Some few rallied – shouting a challenge, one of the troopers rushed the Scions, swinging his hatchet at Traxel. Redirecting the axe with the flat of his chainsword, Traxel fired his plasma pistol into his opponent’s belly. The trooper’s torso exploded in a flash of superheated mist, carrying his head and limbs away on the blast wave.

  The champion’s death was the final blow to the traitors’ morale. Unable to withstand more, the enemy broke utterly. Hemmed in by the eradicant on both flanks, the survivors retreated hastily in the direction from which they had come.

  The Taurox roared forward, still firing, its armoured tracks crushing the fallen traitors into the dirt. The Tempestus Scions advanced on its flanks, Bissot and Daviland to the left, Traxel and Norroll on the right, giving the enemy no choice but flight.

  Actis’ sensors pulsed a warning across Norroll’s wrist-slate. ‘Replendus,’ he called. ‘Minefield ahead.’

  The enemy troopers halted. In their haste to flee, they had retreated to the edge of the very minefield they had stumbled into on their way to engage the Taurox earlier. They had been able to deviate around it then with minimal casualties. Pursued by the eradicant and unable to bypass it, they faltered in the face of their predicament.

  ‘Make the traitors clear it,’ Traxel growled.

  Still firing, the Taurox lumbered forward.

  With the devil behind them and the deep blue sea ahead, the traitors tried to swim.

  After halting briefly to allow the Tempestus Scions back inside, the Taurox sped away from the minefield. The enemy troopers had done such an admirable job of clearing the mines that the armoured transport had no difficulty following them through. Leaving the broken remains of the traitor platoon behind, the Scions continued east. The breeze had shifted north, increasing steadily and dispelling much of the ochre smog that had heretofore occluded the battlefront.

  Daviland sutured a gash on Norroll’s right thigh, the dermal stapler whirring as it drew the edges together tightly and covered them with a transparent membrane of synthetic skin to seal the wound and speed recovery.

  Blood caked Norroll’s short beard where it had sheeted from his broken nose, and a livid bruise was spreading just above his right temple, beneath his close-cropped copper-red hair. Norroll wasn’t what Daviland would call handsome, at least not by her estimation of it, and his appeal was not in the least improved by the swelling and severe bruising that accompanied the rightward cant of his nose. His otherwise pasty face was liberally dusted with freckles and marred by old scars.

  Daviland took a firm hold of his nose and snapped it back into place.

  Norroll made no response, which Daviland found surprising in itself. She had expected some manner of inane reaction and found herself inexplicably disappointed when he failed to give one.

  Perhaps he was not as incorrigible as she believed.

  Over the past six months, Daviland had exhaustively detailed First Eradicant’s aberrant behaviours in her assessment logs, and Norroll, in her estimation the most fundamentally broken member, generated the preponderance of her data. From the reports she had read, his proclivity for independent operation, bordering on recklessness, saw him remanded to the eradicant an astonishing two years earlier. Hypnomatic suggestion and enforced chemical mindscaping seemed hopeless, and his contumacy appeared contagious – Norroll and Bissot perpetually strove to outdo one another, bickering like children on-mission and off. The recon trooper might have seemed a simple glory hound to Daviland were he not the most singularly effective hunter and close-in killer she had ever encountered amongst the Tempestus Scions. That he managed to survive for two years in an eradicant was noteworthy, but thriving in such an environment was practically inconceivable.

  Almost as inconceivable as Tempestor Traxel’s wilful inattention to the anomalous behaviour of his subordinates.

  Norroll stared straight ahead, his tawny eyes glassy as he chewed absently on a mouthful of grey protein supplement, paying Daviland no heed as she worked. He had fallen into a hypnogogic trance almost the instant he sat down, speeding recovery from his excursion across no-man’s-land and the subsequent battle. Unconscious but aware, Norroll had followed Daviland’s instructions to remove his helmet before lapsing back to inactivity, periodically biting chunks off the foul-tasting vat-grown protein roll he held – something Daviland knew was always preferable to eat while trancing. Norroll’s eyes, bruised by his broken nose and the suction cups that secured his helm’s multispectral array to his face, stared at nothing as his head rocked gently with the Taurox’s ponderous motion.

  Above Daviland, the transport’s turret traversed, panning side to side, front to back, at random intervals as Durlo’s unstinting vigilance kept them from being taken unawares. Lacking support from other vehicles to cover their travel, the demolitions trooper did it all himself, periodically glancing at the data coming in through the augurs mounted in Norroll’s servo-skull. Durlo minded their surroundings with one hand on the guns’ controls, while the other fiddled incessantly with a gold thronepiece.

  Daviland sat down beside Bissot, who likewise stared ahead vacantly in a trance. Tall, olive-skinned and heavily muscled beneath her armour, the volley gunner wore her black hair cropped in a short, utilitarian cut, to not interfere with her helm. A tattoo was visible above the edge of Bissot’s collar – a small black Imperial aquila above a line of High Gothic script reading: Be just and fear not.

  Silence between missions, something once so normal when she had still served with the 55th Alphic Hydras, had become odd to her since her reassignment to First Eradicant. The marked eccentricities of the eradicant’s Scions had become Daviland’s normal. Surrounded by the constant low rumble of the Taurox’s tracks and the tinny whir of the turret’s hydraulics, she found herself missing her squadmates’ repartee.

  She reached into one of her belt pouches and took out a small metal token, the likeness of a white enamelled shield with a simple red triangle at its centre. The triangle, the symbol of the 55th Alphic Hydras, represented Mount Charax, her parent regiment and true home.

  Daviland had felt herself greatly honoured when Commissar Fennech had recommended she be transferred from the Alphic Hydras to the Xian Tigers to aid in his assessment of the eradicant formations there. Transfers between Militarum Tempestus regiments were nearly unheard of, and she was even more honoured to discover that her regiment would serve as the basis upon which 36th Xian’s eradicants would be evaluated and potentially restructured. Such an honour made the harrowing journey she faced during the nearly three years crossing the galactic gulf seem a worthy endeavour, despite the myriad horrors of warp transit. In the beginning, the honour alone was nearly enough to silence the overwhelming sense of alienation she felt upon her assignment to this new regiment.

  Daviland ran her thumb across the sigil’s bevelled top edge, then glanced to the yellow disc of the Oculus Tigris now emblaz­oned on her left knee. Six months later, and she remained with the Xian Tigers and First Eradicant’s seemingly incorrigible Scions, with no sign of ever being returned to Mount Charax.

  The last embers of her great honour long since extinguished, she wondered if she missed the banter between her new teammates in First Eradicant because it filled, however shallowly, her ever-deepening well of estrangement.

  Traxel sat next to Replendus in the Taurox’s cab, navigating as the vox-operator manoeuvred the armoured gun truck across the artillery-scarred ground and broken trenchworks. The transport rumbled through the ruins of a village, crunching piles of rubble beneath its grav-assisted tracks. The few remaining villagers fled, wretched apparitions retreating into the cover of their ruined homes as the Taurox passed. Durlo panned his twin gatling cannons across wan faces peeking furtively from shattered windows.

  It was an example of what remained of the Zholm valley’s farmers and orchard-keepers. Deemed unsuitable for service to the regiments or to the thronging labour crews on the industrial moon of Ganspur, the war had reduced the villagers to refugees on their own world, huddling in what remained of their homes or in tumbledown encampments at the edges of the battlefield. Unable to differentiate friend from foe, they feared both sides of the conflict, hiding from everyone and sheltering against the fighting and bombardments. Reeking piles of uniformed corpses and scavenged military gear mouldered at the village’s edge, grim testament to how its inhabitants managed to survive amidst the ruins.

  Though Replendus gave the villagers as wide a berth as possible, Traxel appeared to pay them no heed whatsoever, the bruised lids of his hooded eyes focused on the map display before him.

  Above Daviland, Durlo’s golden thronepiece glinted in the Taurox’s low light, flitting back and forth across the knuckles of his left hand as he operated the turret controls with his right.

  She glanced at Traxel in the cab, suddenly angry at the Tempestor’s negligence in ensuring these talented yet obviously damaged Scions received the psychochemical and hypnotic treat­ments that might restore their places in the line. Time and further degradation would only make the process more painful and less likely to succeed – failure would necessitate execution or servitor conversion.

  Daviland tried to convince herself that the uncharacteristic flash of dismay she suddenly felt was because squandering such talent was grossly wasteful, as Fennech had once said.

  ‘Why do you do that?’

  ‘Do what?’ Durlo asked. He rolled his hand from side to side, never looking away from the turret’s targeting display as the coin flitted back and forth between his gauntleted fingers.

  Daviland tilted her head to the side, unsure whether he was joking.

  ‘With the coin?’ Durlo closed his fist on the thronepiece, opening his hand again to display an empty palm. Legerdemain was yet another of Durlo’s peculiarities. ‘Something to do, I suppose.’

  ‘You don’t have enough to do?’

  Durlo shrugged. The coin reappeared and resumed its dance across his fingers.

  Replendus drove the Taurox up an embankment, concealing the tall vehicle behind a berm overlooking the river below as the sun sank towards the horizon. Looking out through a side viewport, Daviland watched the foul, sulphuric waters of Zholm River meander, rust red and treacle slow, across an area that had once been farmland at the edge of a forest. Blackened stumps of trees gave way to the ruined vestiges of civilisation.

  Rising from his seat, Traxel headed towards the rear of the troop compartment. With a nod to Daviland and a clap on the side of Norroll’s head, the Tempestor exited the Taurox’s rear hatch. Following Traxel, Norroll and Daviland crawled to the edge of the breastwork to look out across the river valley.

  Las-fire flashed in the growing twilight on the far side of the river below, the whip-crack release of each round reaching the Scions a split second after each pulse of red and white.

  Norroll pulled a set of magnoculars from a pouch at his side and scanned the area below.

  ‘Tempestor Ezl said there were other Imperial forces on Rilis?’

  ‘He did,’ Traxel said.

  ‘Here.’ Norroll handed the Tempestor his magnoculars.

  Below, a pair of troopers fired from behind the cover of an earthwork, the crisp white of their peaked caps and trousers standing in stark contrast to the red-piped cobalt of their jackets. Their gold epaulettes and buttons, black boots and silver belt buckles faintly glistened in the twilight. The two troopers provided covering fire for four others struggling to weld a heavily oxidised steel plate over a rent in a Chimera’s hull. Blast scoring and las-impacts marred nearly every surface of the vehicle, leaving what little remained of its original matt black almost entirely obscured beneath a caked ochre layer of Rilisian dust.

  The Chimera’s multi-laser spat las-bolts over the two troopers to its fore, lashing at the unseen enemy beyond them with strobing flashes of energy.

  ‘Iron Guard,’ Traxel said, handing back Norroll’s magnoculars. ‘Back to the Taurox. Time to lend a hand.’