Crawling back down the embankment, the three Scions embarked the gun truck.

  ‘Replendus,’ Traxel said as he knelt behind the driver’s seat, ‘are you receiving any vox-traffic from the Mordians below?’

  ‘Not sure, Tempestor. Everything I pick up is encrypted. I was trying to break the ciphers while you were outside, but no success yet.’

  ‘Set clarion to broad-spectrum jamming and broadcast my voice in the clear.’

  ‘Sir, if they can hear you in the clear, so can the enemy.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  Replendus bent over his vox-array, now connected to the Taurox’s onboard vox-mount. Adjusting dials as he muttered the catechisms of actuation, he toggled a series of switches up and down repeatedly, cursing as he argued with the machine’s recalcitrant spirit. A rune below the set’s antenna flashed red. He lit a small scented votive and placed it atop the vox-assembly with a mumbled prayer. Soon, the scent of promethium and myrrh filled the Taurox’s cab.

  The red light below the antenna continued to blink.

  With a frustrated hiss, Replendus pulled a servo-skull from his pack. Taking hold of the heavy-gauge vox-fill cable, he flicked back the spring-loaded green steel fill connector sheathing with his right thumb. Hissing the Savant’s Benediction for Meaningful Connectivity between his teeth, he licked his left index finger, using his saliva to wet the interface’s gasket ring to ensure the Omnissiah would bless the seal. After blowing thrice across the thirteen golden tines that would couple the skull to the vox-set’s service connector, he carefully linked the cable assembly to the prepared steel interface plug on the vox. Pressing firmly, he twisted the connector sheathing clockwise. Checking its fastness, Replendus spoke the invocation to kindle the servo-skull’s spirit.

  A green light blinked in the skull’s right socket, flashing rapidly. Its onboard cogitators whirred as it introduced itself to the clarion’s machine spirit. A garbled stutter broke from the vox, squealing as Replendus twisted a pair of dials. He mumbled a quick prayer as he adjusted another knob.

  The servo-skull’s cogitators clattered like a maglev train, the light in its orbit blinking erratically. With a shuddering clank and a sudden whiff of ozone, the construct fell silent. A few seconds later, its lamp stopped blinking and became a steady, solid green glow. With a pop, the red light below the vox-array’s antenna blinked off.

  ‘Your will is done, adept of the forge,’ the servo-skull intoned, its monotone voice distorted by crackling static. ‘May the Omnissiah bless your endeavour.’

  ‘Handy you had that servo-skull,’ Bissot said, leaning over Replendus’ seat with interest. ‘Where did you come by it?’

  Replendus hitched a thumb over his right shoulder, towards Durlo.

  ‘Did you nick that from a tech-adept?’ Bissot gasped.

  ‘I didn’t nick it, Favae,’ Durlo said indignantly. ‘I don’t nick things. And nicking things from the Adeptus Mechanicus gets your gear cursed. I found it.’

  Bissot snorted. ‘Lucky find, then.’

  Its strength boosted by the Taurox’s power supply, Replendus’ clarion vox-link stepped on all other stations in range, overriding them as it broadcast Traxel’s voice over all frequencies across the bandwidth.

  ‘Soldiers of the God-Emperor, this is First Eradicant, Thirty-Sixth Xian Tigers, Militarum Tempestus. Mordian force on the eastern bank of the Zholm, identify yourselves.’

  The Mordian troopers across the river turned suddenly, momentarily halting their hasty repair as Traxel’s voice burst through their squad’s vox-systems. Ahead of them, the exchange of fire briefly ceased altogether, both sides taken aback by the unexpected transmission that broke across every vox-feed.

  ‘First Eradicant?’ a guttural voice crackled back in heavily accented Low Gothic, the response as much a question as a reply. ‘This is the Eight-Hundred-and-Thirty-Second Mordian.’

  ‘Hail, Eight-Hundred-and-Thirty-Second Mordian,’ Traxel said. ‘We are due west of you across the river and en route to your position.’ He swatted Replendus’ shoulder.

  The vox-operator disengaged the brakes and gunned the engines. Black smoke belched from the exhausts as he hit the accelerator. The gun truck climbed over the berm, rapidly picking up speed as it rolled down the hill towards the river.

  ‘Acknowledged, First Eradicant,’ the heavily accented voice said. ‘We see you.’

  Across the Zholm, the Mordians cheered. Plumes of black smoke roiled skyward as a trio of Chimeras rumbled back to life behind the shelter of their earthworks.

  The Taurox plunged into the Zholm, plumes of red-stained water spraying in its wake as it thundered across the riverbed. Accelerating as the transport burst free of the water, Replendus steered the armoured vehicle up the opposite bank, the Taurox’s four independently powered tracks easily taking it over the rise.

  ‘Replendus, take us between those two enemy Chimeras,’ Traxel said, indicating the ochre transports the Mordians had been engaging. ‘Get behind them, then cover us while we deploy.’

  First Eradicant’s Taurox rumbled past the rightmost Mordian Chimera with its improvised armour plating, the quad-tracked gun truck easily outstripping the battered infantry fighting vehicle as multi-laser fire was exchanged anew. Crimson streaks strobed across the battlefield, flashing like lightning in the darkness as they stitched across the enemy’s armoured transports.

  The eradicant held their fire. Optimised for an anti-infantry role, the Taurox Prime’s side-mounted hotshot volley guns and gatling cannons were nearly useless against a Chimera’s armour. Las-fire and heavy bolter rounds peppered the Taurox, gnawing at the vehicle’s frontal armour like scree-gnats upon the shaggy hide of the beast that was its namesake, and just as easily ignored. Opening the throttle, Replendus outpaced the other two Mordian Chimeras, weathering enemy fire as it roared between the two enemy transports Traxel had indicated. Pivot-steering around once it was behind them, the Taurox opened fire with hotshot volley guns and a hail of gatling fire, chewing into the armoured vehicles’ lighter rear armour and keeping the enemy buttoned up inside.

  Caught between the Mordian Chimeras and First Eradicant’s Taurox Prime, the enemy vehicles pivoted and opened fire. Heavy bolter and multi-laser rounds hammered the gun truck’s front armour.

  Bissot and Daviland charged out through the Taurox’s left side hatch, already firing before they hit the ground as Traxel and Norroll plunged out through the hatch on the right. Screened by Durlo’s and Replendus’ covering fire, the Scions transcribed a broad arc around the Chimeras’ flanks. Once behind the transports, Daviland and Norroll tossed krak grenades onto the vehicles’ upper hatches, blowing the doors down onto the infantry within. Billowing smoke, the Chimeras’ rear hatches dropped, disgorging the panicked, disoriented survivors straight into the eradicants’ fire.

  Daviland and Norroll each tossed frag grenades into the gaping troop bays and got clear. Detonating with a tremendous bang within a split second of one another, the grenades killed the vehicles’ drivers, turret gunners and the assistant drivers manning the bow-mounted heavy bolters – the method was unspectacular but effective.

  Less than two minutes had passed since First Eradicant’s assault on the Chimeras began. Their enemy eliminated, the Scions re-embarked the Taurox wordlessly, their return to the vehicle coordinated by reflex by a life of deep hypnotic conditioning, relentless drilling and merciless training. Sealing the hatches behind them, the Tempestus Scions moved to locate their next targets.

  Bissot assisted Durlo with reloading the gatling guns’ ammunition hoppers. By the time they were finished, the eradicant was already in position to dismount and engage again.

  III

  Atebe scanned the installation through the scope of her Ryza-pattern/226B hotshot long-las. She stretched out across a long branch in a tall daekki tree, all but invisible beneath the canopy of spade-like leaves and the enveloping folds of her cameleoline cloak.

  Below her, the traitor 212th Mechanised conducted a rapid mass resupply at the Rilisian militia’s mostly derelict Kiemchek Ridge Depot. Located several miles behind the forward lines, distance and obscurity had spared the depot from the devastation to the west.

  Vehicles underwent emergency maintenance in crumbling motor pools, while the regiment’s casualties were laid out for triage on the cracked pavement and patches of weed-choked grass surrounding the depot’s dilapidated medical facility. Full-bellied cargo-8 supply haulers were mobbed by squads of filthy, ­bedraggled troopers in search of ammo packs, rations and water. The furtive, haunted glances of the troopers’ hollow eyes and their tight grips on their lasguns spoke of horrors witnessed, even before their return home to Rilis.

  Her eye pressed against the rubber cup on her scope’s rear aperture, Atebe focused on a pair of figures at the edge of one hastily cleared motor pool. Officers – Rilisians made them easy to spot with their brown leather greatcoats under their dark mustard flak armour. Even the lieutenants, who boasted no greatcoats, were marked by the light khaki trousers they wore beneath their olive drab jackets. Easy for the troops to identify at range, but easy for everyone else, too.

  The pair she watched were engaged in a heated argument. She adjusted her magnification, zooming in on the officer to the left and subjecting him to minute, if rapid, scrutiny. Hypnotically implanted information, rooted in her mind before deployment, flashed into her conscious thoughts. The Rilisian order of battle, heraldic data and high-value target profiles populated in her forebrain with far more clarity than they could have if she had tried to memorise the details herself.

  The officer wore his gleaming silver Imperialis rank insignia mounted on his epaulettes and a blue-and-gold braid draped over his right shoulder. A colonel – regimental commander, by the green tabs on his shoulder boards – holding his helmet in his left hand. He was tall, lean and clean-shaven, as all Rilisian troops were, with close-cropped black hair greying at the temples. Though his skin was darker and more aged than in the picts, the mole on the left eyebrow, the scar marring the bridge of his flattened nose and half a dozen other facial markers ensured that Atebe now knew Colonel Dashrek Gruenner’s face as intimately as she knew her own. Fresh bandages, already soaking through with blood, covered the right side of his face. Gruenner was fourth on her list of high-value targets.

  He argued with an older man, another senior officer, who had his back to Atebe. Shorter than Gruenner and considerably stockier, his responses were unambiguously negative. Even from behind, she could make out the twin silver starbursts on the dark blue shoulder boards of his greatcoat. Even though he was facing away and wearing a helmet, fifteen physical markers identified him as Major General Oleg Hurdt, commander of the Third Rilisian Division, Mechanised Assault.

  Hurdt was the primary target on Xi-3-1’s priority kill list, and the crosshairs of Atebe’s long-las were fixed on the back of his head.

  ‘I’ve got eyes on General Hurdt,’ Atebe whispered, the tip of her index finger resting lightly on her trigger. Reflexively, she released her breath, consciously slowing her heart rate. The sense of separation between her and her long-las blurred as she entered a semi-trance known as the Killstate.

  ‘You’re certain?’ Trooper Quisse’s voice crackled over Atebe’s vox-link. Quisse, who had served as Tempestor Ezl’s second-in-command in Xi-3-1, was the senior trooper in their detachment – while Commissar Fennech was in overall command, he had been called away for an urgent conference over the vox several minutes before.

  ‘Hurdt and Colonel Gruenner,’ Atebe confirmed. ‘No question. I’ve got a shot lined up.’

  ‘Take it,’ Quisse ordered.

  ‘You will hold your fire.’

  The voice, unequivocal despite its conversational warmth, broke onto the vox-link.

  Atebe instinctively raised her finger from the trigger as the voice shocked her from the Killstate. ‘Commissar,’ she breathed. ‘I thought you were on the regimental channel.’

  ‘I am monitoring both.’

  ‘I have General Hurdt and Colonel Gruenner in my sights, sir.’ She bit her lip, her inbuilt, instinctive desire to eliminate two of the highest-priority targets on her implanted target list conflicting with Commissar Fennech’s order.

  ‘Noted. And you will hold your fire.’

  ‘We’re unlikely to get another opportunity like this, commissar.’

  ‘Agreed. However, we’ve had a significant breakthrough on our end, and the senior ground forces commander has ordered that we and our comrades in Attack Battalion hold fast as the Hundred-and-Thirty-Ninth coordinates their attack. Hurdt and Gruenner have been marked for capture and future interrogation.’

  ‘Sir, I could fatally disrupt the enemy chain of command now. They’d never have a chance against any coming assault.’

  ‘I have already had this conversation with Colonel Zheev, Trooper Atebe. Our orders are set beneath an incontrovertible seal.’

  Atebe let out a breath, still watching Hurdt through the scope of her long-las. Orders overrode instinct every time.

  ‘Acknowledged, commissar.’ She paused. ‘Do you wish for me to return to your position?’

  ‘No. Remain where you are and await orders. Fennech out.’

  Atebe took a deep, sulphur-laden breath. She had fought all manner of foes during her years as a Scion. Two years before, she had spent almost three gruelling months assigned to an eradicant, and her time in the kill-squad had scoured her clean of almost all remaining emotion. She sometimes considered her time in Second Eradicant as an inoculation, as the exposure to so much horror and privation inured her against feeling much of anything afterwards.

  Fennech was something else. There was a distance to him – a coldness beneath the layers of unfailing politeness and propriety. Even the perfect intonation in that warm, paternal baritone of his deeply unsettled Atebe. She had watched him execute discipline-lax soldiers with the same bland disregard he displayed when killing the enemy, devoid of malice or regret. It was as if he had compressed every solitary particle of his humanity into a tiny kernel, then buried it in the darkest, most frigid corner of his soul he could find.

  Finally exhaling the breath she had been holding, she resumed her watch on the depot, relieved that her current position limited her exposure to him. She had few emotions left to lose.

  Leaning over Traxel’s shoulder, Norroll watched Kiemchek Ridge Depot’s outer perimeter expand through the Taurox’s front view slits with the fervent anticipation that always preceded a major engagement. He grinned beneath his respirator, delighted at the opportunity to once again participate in a full-scale battle, rather than the solitary and clandestine operations which had been his sole meat and drink since being consigned to First Eradicant. It was life as a Scion was meant to live it, and his heart thundered with the joy of it.

  Glancing around the Taurox, he knew he was not the only one so profoundly stirred by the promise of bringing death en masse to the God-Emperor’s foes. There was an electricity in the air, an urgency that grew amongst the Scions as their objective drew ever closer. Even Traxel was not immune to the excitement and leaned forward in his seat in anticipation.

  Norroll was grudgingly impressed by the speed with which the motley of loyalist formations had come together following First Eradicant’s contact with the Mordians – experience had taught him to expect quite the opposite. Such coordination amongst disparate Militarum forces was difficult under the most ideal of circumstances, with jockeying between commanders often crippling efforts before marshalling even got underway. Norroll suspected that a fervent desire for payback had much to do with the willingness with which the loyalists committed themselves to the assault and enthusiastically submitted to Colonel Zheev’s lead.

  A barrage of artillery streaked overhead as the Xian Tigers breached the traitors’ first predetermined fire zone, the rush of the shells’ flight momentarily audible even above the noise of the Taurox. An Earthshaker round splashed down behind and to the left of the transport, the blast wave of its detonation buffeting the armoured truck on its tracks. Shrapnel rang like a gong against the Taurox’s hull.

  Chaos erupted across the vox. ‘Bear and Cold Steel Battalions, Hundred-and-Thirty-Ninth, and Two-Hundred-and-Twenty-Second Krieg Separate reporting multiple losses from indirect,’ Replendus said, though they could all hear the reports over the Taurox’s speakers.

  ‘They’re a more tempting target. Let them draw the enemy’s fire,’ Traxel said indifferently. ‘Keep well ahead of them and get inside the artillery’s effective range.’

  A shell detonated under fifty yards from the Taurox’s fore. Debris peppered the gun truck’s front, shattering the viewport in front of Traxel. Replendus jinked to the side with a curse.

  ‘Forward,’ Traxel said. ‘You will not divert laterally again.’

  ‘Tempestor, aye.’

  Despite Replendus’ apparent misgivings about plunging headlong through an artillery barrage, the vox-operator’s contributions to the Imperial mobilisation had been nothing less than astonishing. With the aid of his servo-skull, Replendus had transformed the eradicant’s Taurox Prime into a mobile retransmission station, using his clarion vox-array to push a clear signal to every loyalist position along the front. His efforts to unify and distribute the proper encryption djinni across the formation permitted the disparate loyalist forces to communicate securely for the first time in months. As a result, the revanchist Imperial force roared on-line across the plain towards Kiemchek Ridge on a multitude of tracks, daring the enemy’s fire.

  Norroll smirked – if such ingenuity didn’t get Replendus out of the eradicant after this deployment, nothing would.

  First Eradicant travelled well ahead of the Imperial formation, their Taurox easily outpacing the Chimeras of the Astra Militarum infantry and Cold Steel Battalion’s ageing Leman Russ battle tanks. Traxel had remained deliberately aloof during the attack’s coordination, though he worked to ensure the eradicant remained at the assault’s fore. Though he monitored the constant stream of loyalist vox-traffic, he refused to participate in it, reserving sole command of his Scions for himself.