Traxel had likewise remained silent any time Commissar Fennech’s voice crossed the vox, never commenting on the commissar’s recommendations to the senior ground forces commander. From a tactical perspective, Norroll was perplexed by this – First Eradicant’s mission was to locate and reinforce Xi-3-1, or what remained of it, and that made encountering Fennech inevitable. On the other hand, any who had ever met the commissar on Abstinax could readily understand Traxel’s reticence to make contact. Nothing unified the Scions of First Eradicant so much as their mutual loathing of Commissar Fennech.

  The battle cannons of Cold Steel Battalion’s Leman Russ battle tanks roared, tearing through the thin defensive screen of Chimeras and infantry that the 212th had emplaced ahead of the depot.

  Thunder rumbled across the traitors’ front lines as an Earthshaker barrage briefly turned night into day. Called in by Attack Battalion’s forward observers under Commissar Fennech, the artillery batteries of the 139th’s Firepower Battalion hammered Kiemchek Depot, throwing the enemy into utter disarray as the Imperial force tore towards the installation’s front and flanks.

  Staggered by the unexpected cannonade, the enemy fell back, seeking to reconsolidate before the loyalists managed to collapse the gap between them. As the Imperial formations drove forward, Firepower Battalion shifted fire, shelling the traitors’ flanks and rear echelon, further disrupting the enemy’s movement and hemming them in as they attempted to retreat. Unable to escape through the back gate and incapable of reconsolidation, the enemy rapidly lost coherency, scattering into smaller cells which sheltered behind whatever cover lay closest. Commanders screamed orders into the vox, urging their forces to turn and face the loyalists, only to be cut down by sniper fire that lanced from the daekki grove above the depot’s left flank.

  Hurtling ahead of the loyalists, First Eradicant burst through the gates of Kiemchek Ridge Depot. Behind them, the Iron Line of the 139th Rilisian Mech, the Krieg 222nd Separate and the 5228th Tallarn rammed through the facility’s decrepit perimeter defences. The loyalist forces slammed into the enemy’s forwardmost formations like a sledgehammer, crushing infantry beneath their tracks as they drove a wedge through the traitors’ line. The Chimeras’ multi-lasers flashed above the tumult of heavy bolters and the blaze of heavy flamers, scouring the traitors as the eradicant’s Taurox unleashed hell in rending torrents of bullets and hotshot las-fire.

  Covered by bursts from the gatling cannons and Bissot’s volley gun, Traxel leapt from the Taurox, tearing into the shellshocked press of enemy infantry. His plasma rounds bored corkscrewing contrails through the smoke, explosively vaporising their targets as the Tempestor’s chainsword decapitated, gutted and maimed any who found themselves too close. The very air about him lay thick with the sharp, coppery tang of aerosolised blood as Traxel butchered with a master’s efficiency and singularity of purpose, his chainsword’s snarling mono-edged adamantine teeth parting armour, flesh and bone with ease.

  Norroll swept to the Tempestor’s right, monoblades flashing in the light of exchanged multi-laser fire as he plunged through a squad of troopers, the press of bodies too thick for them to effectively retreat into their Chimera. The 212th’s troopers, battered and starving after more than two months of grinding trench warfare, were unable to match the recon trooper’s consummate murderousness as he bowled through them.

  Slinging her lasgun, Daviland sprang past Bissot’s keening volley gun, engaging the enemy with laspistol and dagger. She weaved between them, using her opponents’ momentum against them to deflect attacks struck against her onto their comrades.

  What began as an assault rapidly degenerated into a slaughter. It was battle as First Eradicant liked it best – a merciless cull with no quarter given. Precise application of unremitting violence sent the foe reeling, desperate and incapable of effectively striking back. Carapace armour shrugged off any attack that managed to get through the Scions’ defences, while a lifetime of close-combat training ensured that any answering blow struck would be their opponent’s last.

  The Tempestus Scions’ remorseless extermination of whatever enemy troopers lay in their path proved contagious – thirsty for revenge upon the traitors after months of bloody deadlock, the Imperial loyalists stormed from their Chimeras, cutting down any who stood before them. With the heretics unable to mount a successful defence or counter-attack, it could only be a matter of time before the perfidy of the 212th Rilisian Mech was permanently expunged.

  High above, a throaty vibration shuddered the night, cutting through the blaze of heavy bolter fire and the artillery barrage to the rear. Tossing a frag grenade into a Chimera and getting clear, Norroll looked up.

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  It plummeted through the night sky, riding a plume of smoke as it descended from the heavens like a comet. The roar of its powerful engines shook the firmament itself as it passed, its hull still glowing orange from the heat of atmospheric re-entry. While Norroll had never seen one in person before, he had no doubts about what he was looking at, and it was coming right for them.

  Its meteoric descent drowned out even the din of battle as it hurtled towards Kiemchek Depot on a column of fire. Dumbfounded, the combatants gaped upwards at the doom roaring down on them like a blazing spear hurled by the hand of a wrathful god.

  ‘Drop pod incoming!’ Norroll shouted into the vox, scrambling away to join the eradicant in their seamless withdrawal. They disengaged from combat, retreating towards the depot’s perimeter to put a safe space between them and the most likely point of impact.

  The awestruck Guardsmen in the thick of battle were not so fortunate. Traitor and loyalist alike were flash-incinerated by the pod’s engines in the split second before the entry vehicle smashed into the pavement.

  Norroll dived behind the Taurox as the shock and heated overpressure from the cataclysmic impact hurled Guardsmen in all directions. Raising his head, he hazarded a glance around the track at the fuming craft.

  The drop pod bore little resemblance to the ones Norroll had seen in the picts. Five thick, talonlike struts jutted from each corner, penetrating deep into the pavement around it like dreadful bladed claws. With the whine of hydraulics and the grinding of gears, the blackened pod rose up along its blade struts.

  Traxel picked himself up from where the drop pod’s impact had thrown him down and crawled next to Norroll. He peeked around the Taurox’s track as the oculus hatch on the drop pod’s base spread open, staining the roiling smoke with red light.

  Three figures dropped from the hatch and landed heavily on the ground below, their massive boots crushing pavement that yet smouldered from the heat and force of their arrival. Yellow eyes gleamed through the swirling smoke and dust of their touchdown. Though obscured, there could be no mistaking what they were. Silhouetted in the dull red light cast from their drop pod above as the fumes about them cleared, they appeared inhumanly large and bulky, rendered even more massive by the power armour they wore. They separated wordlessly, moving swiftly across the drop zone with cool assuredness, harbouring no fear of mortal violence. Their fists bore weapons of a scale never intended for human hands.

  A motionless silence, pregnant with foreboding, engulfed the battlefield. The dazed combatants, traitor and loyalist alike, scarcely dared to breathe for fear of drawing the attention of the terrible power which had landed amidst them.

  ‘Astartes,’ Traxel whispered.

  ‘Angels!’ a Guardsman gasped, rising unsteadily from where he sheltered next to Colonel Zheev’s command Chimera. ‘The Angels! Bless us, the Angels of the Emperor have come!’

  One of the three Space Marines turned in his direction, chain­cannon shrieking as the weapon’s rotary barrels spooled up. Flame belched from its muzzle as it vomited a torrent of high-calibre rounds, strafing across the Guardsmen in the Chimera’s shadow and shredding them into indistinguishable masses of riven meat. Muzzle flare backlit the Adeptus Astartes, glinting from plates of pitted, weathered iron edged with tarnished brass. Against the sable black of his left pauldron, the gunfire reflected upon the grimly stylised likeness of a skull forged of dull iron.

  Behind him, a second Space Marine charged Cold Steel Battalion’s Leman Russ command tank, targeting it with a lascannon mounted to the servo-rig on his armour’s power pack. The warrior covered the ground with unimaginable speed, the servo-arm mounted to his back gyroscopically stabilising the massive anti-armour weapon and allowing him to fire on the run. The las-bolt, dazzlingly bright in the darkness, speared through the tank’s turret ring. Terrifyingly nimble for something so large, the Space Marine weaved around the damaged command tank, deftly sidestepping the fire from one of its sponson-mounted heavy bolters. He mag-locked a melta bomb to the engines then sprinted towards the next tank in Cold Steel’s line without pause.

  Even compared to his brothers, the third Space Marine was something vomited from the nethermost depths of nightmare. Forward-curving horns sprouted from his battle helm, and the left half of his power armour was twisted and encumbered with protruding bony growths. His left arm ended in a fused mass of ceramite, flesh and claws, from which extended a keening blade that rippled like the madness of the Great Rift in the night sky above.

  An unfamiliar sensation, as if his heart were being gripped in an icy vice, clutched at Norroll’s chest. As he tore his gaze from the malevolently glowing blade, the sensation passed, leaving only kaleidoscopic afterimages flickering in his vision. Swallowing hard, he looked to Traxel.

  ‘Orders, Tempestor?’

  Traxel stared ahead, transfixed, as the twisted Space Marine loped forward on mismatched legs into a mass of prone Guardsmen, firing his bolt pistol. It howled in gleeful abandon, its blade paring through flak armour as if it were nothing.

  ‘Looking for guidance here, Tempestor,’ Norroll hissed through clenched teeth. He raised his laspistol and took aim at the Space Marine.

  The las-bolt struck true, sparking against the twisted Adeptus Astartes’ plastron. The abhorrent Space Marine continued onwards without pause, running down the Guardsmen fleeing before him.

  Kiemchek Depot was aflame. Smoke belched from the burning wrecks of Chimeras and Leman Russ tanks, enveloping all beneath a choking pall of toxic fumes. All pretence of command and control lost, Guardsmen from both sides bolted, shrieking in breathless, aimless terror as they attempted to escape the broadening kill-zone. Las-bolts flashed in the gloom, loosed into the flickering dark at random by trembling hands until their power packs ran empty.

  The Space Marines orchestrated the firestorm, shaping the chaos around them as if it were the function of some mathematical formula they had solved before the battle was even joined. The cold calculus with which they culled all before them was merely an operation, the only output of which could be their victory. They strode through the destruction, invulnerable and implacable, the loyalists’ fire pattering from their armour as ineffectually as rain. All about them, explosions blossomed in the night, their tumult joining with the screams of the dying to thunder across the battlefield like the laughter of dark gods.

  ‘We need to go,’ Daviland called, sprinting from the far side of the Taurox with Bissot close behind. ‘You and Bissot get in the Taurox, I’ll handle the Tempestor.’

  Durlo opened fire on the warped Heretic Astartes with the Taurox’s gatling cannons, spraying fire across both Imperial and traitor troopers to bring it down.

  ‘Daviland…’ Norroll began to protest.

  ‘Go! I’ll take care of him.’

  With a muttered curse, Norroll followed Bissot through the Taurox’s rear hatch, leaving the Tempestor and medicae-adept outside.

  Atebe adjusted her scope, dialling back the light sensitivity so the chaincannon’s flash wouldn’t blind her. Finding a happy medium, she scanned the Adeptus Astartes gunner, trying to find a weak point in his armour to exploit.

  There were few enough to choose from. The Space Marine’s enormous brass-edged pauldrons provided ample cover for the weaker armour covering his throat. She panned across the series of cables snaking like steel dreadlocks from the back of his battle helm, considering them insignificant. In profile, his two-handed grip on his chaincannon locked the iron-layered plates of ceramite in position, giving her no real targets on his upper body. Scanning lower, she found that he wore a mail skirt, covering the weaker, flexible areas at his hips and the backs of his knees.

  She had no doubt she could penetrate the mail with her hotshot weapon, but the las-round’s effectiveness would be blunted, making it less likely to penetrate the soft armour or cause any significant damage. Scanning back up to his head, she brought her crosshairs level with his eyeline and focused on the side of the augmetic targeting eyepiece mounted to his helm. He was bound to shift fire, so she waited for him to turn and give her a shot.

  She had been displaced twice already during the assault, forced from her hides both times by counter-sniper fire from the Stygians below. They had even managed to tag her, and though her cara­pace had taken the worst of it, one round had creased her left thigh. The pain was negligible enough, but the Stygians’ persistent interruptions made it difficult for her to assume the Killstate.

  The Space Marine chaingunner ceased firing, taking a knee as the hoppers mounted to his backpack cycled fresh ammunition to the weapon’s belt feed. She followed him down, then back up as he opened fire again.

  Patience, patience.

  A lull in the Stygians’ volleys gave her the window she needed.

  The Adeptus Astartes turned right, slowly and steadily, as he raked his torrent of fire across the troopers in front of him, uncaring which side they were on.

  The large augmetic scope over his right eye glowed red in the darkness, targeting the troopers before him. Like the mail skirt, a shot there would likely be wasted.

  Fingertip on the trigger with the barest pressure, she waited.

  He kept turning, cruelly methodical as he scythed down ranks of Guardsmen.

  Another inch, and the centre of his left eye-lens lay between her crosshairs. Almost unconsciously, her finger tightened.

  A Leman Russ exploded, the magnesium-bright detonation of the melta bomb blinding her as she fired.

  She refocused, momentarily disoriented by the sudden glare through her scope. Blinking away the strobing afterimages as best she could, she saw the Space Marine gunner was still standing.

  He was looking right at her, the red glow of his targeting system narrowing as he found and marked her. The brass-edged vox-grille that covered the lower half of his face glowered at her in an overexaggerated snarl. Her las-bolt had left a smouldering dent in the centre of his helm’s forehead, her shot fouled when he had glanced to the explosion behind him.

  Still smoking, the six barrels of his Reaper came up spinning, right in the centre of her scope.

  Atebe dived from the daekki tree as chain-fire chewed through her position, sending a mist of toxic white sap spraying in all directions. She hit the ground hard, and the branch she had been lying on collapsed heavily atop her. Milky sap rained down, burning the exposed skin of her face and right eye, forcing it shut. Ignoring the searing acid, she pried herself free of the branch and moved, long-las in hand as she sprinted towards the hill’s edge, a hail of bullets following at her heels.

  She could almost feel the Adeptus Astartes’ targeting reticule burning between her shoulder blades. She pelted headlong for the cover of the hill, knowing he could take her down at any moment, her carapace useless against such a volume of fire. The rounds followed in her wake, raking towards her – teasingly, breathtakingly close, but never quite close enough. She fought to keep her eyes open as daekki saplings exploded all around, filling the air with a blinding haze of sap.

  The sadistic bastard was milking this out.

  Atebe leapt for cover, throwing herself over the hill’s edge.

  The sound of chain-fire still echoed from the kill-zone, but it had changed.

  On the other side of the hill, First Eradicant’s Taurox Prime pelted the Traitor Astartes with twin gatling fire.

  ‘Tempestor!’ Daviland shouted. ‘Come on!’

  Traxel looked furtively to his left and right, head jerking as he responded to a threat only he could see. Norroll and Bissot dodged past, into the armoured cover of the Taurox, but he didn’t notice them.

  Daviland could practically feel where he was. From the moment the traitor drop pod had disgorged its cargo of Heretic Astartes, as soon as she saw his reaction, she knew that he was back on Tecerriot, fighting for his life against the Space Marine headsman.

  Above her head, Durlo blazed gatling fire, peppering the Adeptus Astartes chaingunner with twin torrents of bullets and forcing him back into the cover of an abandoned Chimera.

  The 139th Mech and its allies were hastily pulling back, limping away from the kill-zone without any semblance of order. Engines roared as the loyalists fled westward, chased by throngs of wailing survivors too slow to embark or too unlucky to find space on a vehicle.

  ‘I’m not moving until you move him, Daviland,’ Replendus voxed from the cab.

  Daviland shook Traxel’s shoulder. ‘Tempestor!’ she shouted into his ear. ‘We have to go!’

  His augmetic left hand twitched on his plasma pistol, shaking it back and forth with erratic, jerking movements.

  Not shaking it – parrying with it. His left hand had been his sword hand before he lost it.

  ‘Traxel!’ she roared, smacking him hard in the side of his helmet. ‘Get moving, Scion!’