A tall man with a perpetual frown and a bulbous nose, Zheev seemed to slouch beneath the weight of his carapace armour. His brown leather greatcoat was shabby and dishevelled, looking like he had been sleeping in it for months – he very likely had. His black hair gave an impression of youthfulness that had long ago ceased to exist anywhere else on him.

  ‘Tempestor will do, colonel,’ Traxel said, refusing to acknowledge Zheev’s intimation of fault.

  Zheev scowled. ‘These two gentlemen standing up here with me are some of the Iron Line’s iron officers, serving as battalion commanders as well as regimental staff.’ He indicated the officer to his right, a stern, grey-haired man who wore a red sash across a gleaming silver cuirass proudly displaying the Imperial aquila in gold. ‘This is Lieutenant Colonel Sahn, Firepower Battalion commander and my master of ordnance.’

  He indicated the officer on his left – a handsome, younger man with a head of thick, close-cropped auburn hair, wearing the customary brown leather greatcoat of a Rilisian field-grade officer. ‘And this is Major Raff, Attack Battalion’s commander and my quartermaster.’

  Zheev chewed his lakrish root. ‘Bear Battalion’s commander, my adjutant, hasn’t joined us yet. I gave Lieutenant Colonel Sarring an important task and she’s doubtless still at it. My Cold Steel Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Calando, was one of those killed in action last night.’

  Traxel nodded his understanding, if not his sympathy. ‘Despite our losses, our assault at Kiemchek forced the enemy to reveal his hand.’

  ‘That’s an exceedingly optimistic way to view losses I would conservatively refer to as catastrophic.’

  Traxel was undeterred. ‘The enemy has shown that it has thrown its lot in with the Archenemy, sir. That alone should ignite the flames of righteous retribution amongst you and your men. With preparation, we can locate and eliminate the Traitor Astartes directly and strike the head from this rebellion.’

  ‘“Ignite the flames of righteous retribution”?’ someone beneath Zheev’s command dais scoffed bitterly. ‘I don’t think we need Space Marines to do that, once you tin soldiers showed up.’

  Traxel ignored him, his attention still on Zheev.

  A junior officer pushed through the rabble of Guardsmen towards the Scions.

  ‘Let it go, lieutenant,’ Zheev cautioned.

  ‘No, sir. I won’t. This one here,’ he said, closing on Norroll. ‘Handsome fellow with the monoblades. Glory boy here dropped on my platoon two days ago, out on the edge of no-man’s-land. Killed six of our troopers. Nailton, the only survivor, said he tore them apart.’ The lieutenant was half a head shorter than Norroll, the tip of his nose barely an inch from the recon trooper’s chin.

  Norroll stared past him, his tawny eyes inert.

  ‘I’ve read the report, lieutenant,’ Zheev said. ‘It was a regrettable incident, but these things happen in the fog of war.’

  ‘“Fog of war”? Really, sir? You’re going to give me that “­regrettable incident” crap, too?’

  ‘I am, because it was,’ Zheev said. ‘You are out of line, Lieutenant Dormichel. Stand down.’

  ‘I see, sir,’ Dormichel said, nodding. ‘It’s true that a few men killed by friendlies on the edge of no-man’s-land is no cause for retribution. But are you telling me you’re going to stand for the absolute slaughter they walked us into last night? Colonel Sarring is still running the butcher’s bill–’

  ‘Lieutenant,’ Zheev said, his voice betraying his tension. ‘For your own safety, step away from the Tempestus trooper.’

  Dormichel looked into Norroll’s lifeless stare, his hand resting on the pommel of the bayonet sheathed at his hip, face pale with anger. ‘Don’t worry, colonel. I’m so far beneath a noble Scion of the Imperium like him, he doesn’t even notice me.’ He flicked the button of the sheath’s fastening strap. ‘Maybe he’d like to see how it feels, being gutted like a fish.’

  Norroll remained still, his gaze unfocused. The lieutenant was no threat, but he was curious what the young officer would do.

  ‘Lieutenant Dormichel!’ Zheev shouted. ‘You are relieved of your duties until–’

  The bolt pistol’s report exploded across the confines of the command room as Lieutenant Dormichel’s head detonated, spraying blood and brain matter over Norroll’s face and the back of Traxel’s head and neck. No few Guardsmen in the auditorium started as the shot rang out. A handful dived to the floor, seeking cover.

  None of the Scions reacted. Blood dripping down his face, Norroll didn’t even bat an eye – discipline forbade it.

  Commissar Fennech loomed over Norroll, his face impassive as an alabaster effigy’s. He held his bolt pistol loosely at his side, almost casually, the muzzle angled towards the ground.

  ‘Forgetting oneself on the field of battle, however well intentioned, jeopardises the mission, Cadet Norroll,’ Fennech said. ‘If the God-Emperor smiles, it is only the transgressor who pays the price for indiscipline.’ He raised a white-gloved finger admonishingly. ‘I have learned, however, that the Emperor rarely smiles.’

  The obsidian sands of Abstinax faded away as Norroll tasted fresh blood on his lips. He had no need to turn to know who had executed the incensed lieutenant.

  Commissar Fennech stood in the doorway behind the Scions, smoking bolt pistol gripped in his white-gloved hand. The report still echoed from the plasteel walls. Holstering the bolt pistol, the old man limped forward, steadying himself on a cane.

  The Scions stood aside as Fennech hobbled between them with uneven steps. He leaned heavily upon his stick, balancing on it as he clopped unsteadily across the floor on prosthetic wooden feet. He halted between Norroll and Traxel, standing over the headless corpse without so much as a downward glance.

  He was, in many respects, quite different from the iron-handed martinet who had ruthlessly tutored the Scions of Abstinax on the virtues of discipline and sacrifice. Beneath the panoply of a decorated Imperial commissar, Fennech was an old man, his body destroyed by decades of battle in unstinting service to his God-Emperor. He wore a simple patch of black leather over his left eye, and only the nub of his ear’s external tragus remained in the scarring that stretched the skin taut across his skull’s left hemisphere. A power sword lay scabbarded on his right hip, though he would find it difficult to draw – the empty left sleeve of his greatcoat was neatly folded and pinned beneath the gold-tasselled epaulette that extended over the space where his shoulder used to be.

  The commissar declined his head in a curt, respectful nod. ‘Forgive the interruption, colonel,’ he said affably. ‘Pray, continue.’

  Zheev removed the lakrish root from his mouth and quietly spat out a tiny splinter of wood. Like the Scions, the colonel had not reacted to the sudden execution, though he had visibly paled.

  Norroll took conscious leave of the situation, lapsing into the Rote of Unimpeachable Calm. By the third iteration, his heart rate began to slow.

  Lieutenant Colonel Sarring limped as she sprinted across the command centre. She splashed through the standing puddles that covered the floors, trying to ignore the searing ache throbbing in her augmetics’ anchor points. Already late due to the casualty reports she had been compiling for Colonel Zheev, the unmistakable discharge of a bolt weapon echoing through the ramshackle structure had quickened her pace. Her teeth clenched as she struggled to bite back the pain spearing down her spine, a persistent reminder of her leading Cold Steel Battalion’s Armatura Company to victory over the aeldari, fifteen years earlier.

  She wondered if someone had got inside again. It had proved easy enough for the traitors before, slipping past sentries unimpeded because they were Rilisian like them.

  No. Not any more, they weren’t.

  The scent of bolt propellant wafted through the open blast doors of the auditorium, mingling with the odour of blood and faeces when she got inside. The door was bottlenecked by a group of four Tempestus Scions in filthy green carapace armour and green berets, barring her way to the command dais. Beneath their heavy boots, blood seeped towards her, spreading as the thin layer of water on the floor rendered it less viscous.

  She slid to a halt on the water-slicked decking, almost losing her footing.

  Struggling to maintain her balance, Sarring gripped the door’s heavy plasteel frame, nearly dropping her sheaf of reports. Righting herself, she instinctively checked the bundle of parchments, shuffling them together and tucking them back in the blue folder she carried. Embarrassment pushed panic, but not pain, to the side.

  A one-armed commissar wearing an eyepatch watched her with detached curiosity, before favouring her with a thin smile that was less than reassuring.

  ‘Tempestor,’ Zheev called, ‘kindly have your Scions stand aside so Lieutenant Colonel Sarring may pass.’

  Sarring thought she noted a strained tremulousness to the colonel’s voice – a mean hint of disquiet breaking through his perpetually affected air of nonchalance. She glanced to Sahn and Raff next to him, wondering if they noticed it as well, but they seemed absorbed in their own apprehensions.

  The Scions parted in silent unison, forming up along either side of the entryway like some grim honour guard lining Sarring’s way. The moment they moved aside, she saw the headless corpse of a lieutenant, his blood soaking across the floor and splattered across the wall.

  She swallowed thickly, and hoped he hadn’t been one of hers.

  Sarring could feel the thrum of the capacitor units attached to the Scions’ backpacks, feeding power through thick cables to their high-powered lasguns. She kept her eyes on the lieutenant’s body as she passed, careful not to make eye contact with the Scions, who reeked of blood, death and ozone.

  She accidentally glanced up at the Tempestus trooper to her left as she stepped over the corpse – blood and chunks of brain and bone stuck to the Scion’s bruised face and short ginger beard, congealing on his chin and dripping down his cuirass. He was quite tall and powerfully built, with light red hair and inanimate tawny eyes. A pair of monoblades lay sheathed on either side of his belt buckle, and Sarring suppressed a shiver.

  She recognised him by his panoply, as it had been described to her by the sole survivor of a squad from Dormichel’s company. The Scion had slaughtered her troopers and moved on before they had even been able to react.

  Zheev had asked her to forget about the incident – asked, not ordered. The Old Dog had called it a regrettable error resulting from the confusion of battle, but she hadn’t been able to let it go. Nailton, the survivor, was a boy pulled out of his basic Militarum training to fight the traitors, not so much older than her own son.

  Still looking at the Scion’s bruised, bloody face and his bland auburn stare, Sarring realised that he probably couldn’t have cared less which side of the war her troopers had been on.

  Sarring turned away, her gaze falling on dark eyes every bit as spiritless as those of the Scion who had slaughtered her men. She recognised him as a Tempestor by his three rank chevrons. He was bald and clean-shaven – haggard, severe and dusky-skinned, his weatherbeaten face and scalp crisscrossed by scars and burns. Blood had spattered across the back of his head and over his left shoulder, though like his subordinate, he appeared perfectly indifferent to it.

  The squad’s vital signs pulsed across the data-slate mounted to the Tempestor’s right vambrace. Many of her troopers had told her, in conspiratorially hushed tones, that the Militarum Tempestus cut its Scions’ hearts out and forced them to wear them in metal boxes on their wrists. While the wives’ tale had always sounded ridiculous to Sarring before, she now found her attention fixed upon the Scions’ heart rates pulsing across the slate.

  Sarring tore her eyes away from the Tempestor and his vambrace. Cold, cold bastards, these Scions.

  Trying not to rush as she ascended the command dais, Sarring offered her folder to Zheev.

  ‘Apologies for my lateness, sir. It was a bit of a struggle collating the reports. There are contradictions–’

  ‘Just give me the basics.’

  ‘The basics, sir?’ Sarring said, her voice for Zheev alone. ‘We’re sinking. Everything we lost in the three months leading up to the assault on Kiemchek Ridge amounts to just under half of what we lost last night. Balt’s battalion is hanging on by its fingernails, and Cold Steel Battalion has been rendered almost completely non-mission capable. What we have left–’

  ‘Throne, I know what we have left,’ Zheev said. ‘Cooks. Balt’s supply clerks. Your personnel orderlies, Euri. Vox-operators. Three companies of artillery, half of it wrecked, and what’s left of their complement of mounted security. Seven barely operational tanks. Some scouts. Enough shattered infantry platoons to make up maybe a whole battalion and a half, if the Emperor smiles on us. A few captains, a handful of lieutenants, some sergeants, and you, Balt and Archie. Am I missing anything?’

  Sarring shook her head. ‘That’s about the size of it, sir. The presentation I made detailing that basic summary presents it with a little more colour. It’s only sixteen pages long.’

  Zheev snorted cheerlessly through his nose. ‘Fortunately, we have our allies,’ he stated loudly, facing the assembly.

  A tiny smile tilted the edges of Sarring’s lips. The Old Dog’s theatrical bombast meant he was starting to sound himself again.

  ‘Our allies,’ Zheev said, ‘whom we can finally communicate with, thanks to the will of the God-Emperor, and the exceptional efforts of Captain Grosht of the Eight-Hundred-and-Thirty-Second Mordian and Tempestor Traxel of the Thirty-Sixth Xian Tigers.’

  ‘That is so, sir,’ Sarring said under her breath, ‘but we are having a bit of difficulty coordinating with our allies, our ability to communicate with them notwithstanding. The disparate methods of warfare, standard operating procedures–’

  ‘Which brings us all here,’ Zheev interrupted. ‘Emperor knows, our lack of coordination over the past months has been hugely detrimental and kept any of us from mounting a meaningful strike against Hurdt’s traitors. Some forces here prefer mechanised assaults. Some like rolling with the punches before swinging back. And don’t get me started on the Krieg…’

  Zheev waved at the small delegation from the 222nd Krieg Separate below. ‘No offence intended, Major Gunvaldt.’

  ‘None taken, sir,’ the Krieg officer replied impassively, his voice distorted through his respirator’s voxmitter. ‘I understood it as a compliment.’

  ‘My intent is to get us all on the same sheet of music, especially considering our losses. Our scouts have reported the Two-Hundred-and-Twelfth has displaced from Kiemchek Ridge and is moving eastward, towards Vytrum,’ Zheev said. ‘After the drubbing we suffered last night, coupled with the past three months along the Zholm, we cannot fulfil our oaths to the Throne as discrete formations any longer. As senior officer of this regiment and acting senior ground forces commander on Rilis, I am reorganising the Hundred-and-Thirty-Ninth Mech and its allies into a combined regiment.’

  The Astra Militarum forces below the command dais glanced amongst themselves. Some nodded to one another in silent acknowledgement of the fact as it was, while others accepted the notice without external response.

  ‘Major Gunvaldt,’ Zheev snapped. ‘Please step up to the command dais.’

  Gunvaldt separated from his subordinates without comment or ostentation, passing through the assembled Guardsmen and officers to ascend the dais, stopping just as he reached the top of the stairs.

  ‘As seniormost officer among our allies, I’m appointing you as commander of Cold Steel Battalion, One-Hundred-and-Thirty-Ninth Mechanised Infantry,’ Zheev announced, indicating a spot next to Major Raff on the grated steel deck of the platform the 139th’s commanders stood on.

  ‘In addition to this duty,’ Zheev continued, ‘you will serve as the Hundred-and-Thirty-Ninth’s chief of planning and operations. The Two-Hundred-and-Twenty-Second Krieg Separate will likewise fold into Cold Steel Battalion, as will the remnants of Lieutenant Basharaneh’s Five-Thousand-Two-Hundred-and-Twenty-Eighth Tallarn and Lieutenant Carritz’s platoon from One-Thousand-Seven-Hundred-and-Twenty-Fourth Catachan.’ His pronouncement complete, Zheev thundered his regimental motto: ‘Iron Line!’

  The battle cry stuttered through the assembled Astra Militarum like a slightly damp string of firecrackers, the still unfamiliar motto spreading patchily across the auditorium until it had risen from each disparate faction with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

  Satisfied enough with their reaction, Zheev nodded. ‘Dismissed.’

  The assembled Astra Militarum forces departed, passing by the Scions who silently lined both sides of the command room’s entrance. When the last of the assembled Guardsmen had left, the blast doors ground shut.

  ‘Tempestor Traxel,’ Zheev said. ‘A moment. I have something special for First Eradicant.’

  V

  Daviland watched the rotating image representing Kiemchek Ridge Depot fizzle into green haze with a stutter and a tickle of static. Servitors burbled nonsensically as they received freshly cogitated data for hololithic in-load, their monotasked minds rapidly building a fresh structure from the jade light.

  The image of the new facility was not terribly different from the representation of Kiemchek Ridge Depot that it had replaced. Sixteen squat warehouses took up nearly the entirety of the installation’s quadrangular structure, divided by a broad central avenue and tributary roads which connected the facilities together. The base was walled, but insignificantly fortified, with a guard tower overlooking each corner of the perimeter.