Forgotten Sons
Nick Kyme

	Landfall
	I
	Heka’tan rose from the smoke cloud like a statue of living onyx. The woman was alive but unconscious. Grey tendrils of smoke coiled off the warrior’s ebon skin from where he’d shielded her from the blast. Debris crunched underfoot – most of the ceiling, together with the lume-strip array, had collapsed. Somewhere in the crawl space above, an orange glow flickered. 
	The fire hadn’t reached the meditation chamber yet and the billowing smoke coming through the vents was escaping upwards. At least she wouldn’t choke to death on the fumes. Others might be injured, in need of rescue. The ship lurched suddenly, throwing Heka’tan against the wall. It was in its death throes now. He could feel the shuddering of the failing engines through the bulkhead, hear the whine of rapid depressurisation from the gash in the fuselage. 
	The door was blocked. Heka’tan felt the heat beyond it and heard the crackle of flames ravaging the adjacent corridor section. During meditation, his battle-plate was secured in the armourarium. He recalled the oaths of moment affixed to his shoulder guards and greaves. One of those vows was echoed in the onyx flesh of his naked torso too, branded eternally.
	Protect the weak.
	It was written in sigil-language, the ancient tongue of Nocturne. Heka’tan was born from fire on this hell-world. Rather than debilitate, the blaze invigorated him. He tore the door off its hinges, closing his eyes as the flames swept out and over him. They burned out quickly, devouring the oxygen. Heka’tan stayed anchored in place until it was done, a light tingling on his skin the only lasting evidence of the fire’s touch. 
	A corridor stretched in front of him. The air hazed with the heat of conflagration. Again, the ship bucked. Not long now before impact. He glanced back at the woman. 
	The vox alongside him crackled to life, the pilot’s last words. 
	’...ing down. Brace... selves... impact. Emperor... preserve us...’ 
	Detached and calm, even in the face of imminent and violent landfall, Heka’tan found the last remark curious. It sounded almost like a prayer. 
	The engine drone became a scream. For a few seconds, Heka’tan remembered... The screaming, the death and blood. ‘Hell made real’ – they were Gravius’s words. Heka’tan staggered, but not from weakness or fatigue. He staggered at the memory of it, of that place where so many had died and so much had gone wrong. 
	Father.
	The thought was a painful one, forming unbidden. 
	Vulkan was alone. He was alone and surrounded. They were coming for him. He was... he...
	...shook his head to banish the nightmare. The smoke in the chamber and the corridor was thickening. Heka’tan heard shouting above the roar of the flames. The desperate ship was arrowing through the sky too fast, too steep. Its sides shuddered hard, presaging a terminal impact.
	A sudden change in pitch signalled the ship was coming to the end of its fiery trajectory. The hold was ahead. Heka’tan was halfway down the corridor when he realised he wouldn’t make it in time. Arcadese would have to protect the others, assuming he wasn’t already dead.
	‘I’m coming, human…’ he muttered, turning on his heel and racing back through the door. At least he could save one life. 
	As Heka’tan embraced her, the Stormbird hit the ground with all the force of a drop-pod and the world exploded into hell and fire.
	II
	Earlier...
	Persephia eyed her master with fear. 
	Hulking plates, edged with gold, sat atop his shoulders. A blade as thick and long as her arm was strapped to the warrior’s thigh. Cobalt metal armoured his form. She found only cold grey stone in the giant’s eyes, glaring back at her with piercing intensity, and looked down again. 
	The Immortal Emperor’s Legiones Astartes, His Angels of Death – no, that wasn’t right – his Angels of Death, created to protect mankind from threats beyond the stars. A billion, billion worlds; a million, million cultures all compliant – now at war. 
	Who will protect us from ourselves? Persephia wondered, keeping her eyes on the shaking deck. Who will protect us from you?
	War was everywhere, or so it seemed, so the propagandists, the rabble-rousers and Imperial Army press-gangers would have the galaxy believe. Where then the promised era of prosperity and peace made possible through the pre-eminent Imperium? The reality was a galaxy divided.
	Join the Emperor, a distant, untouchable figure – after all, who beyond His favoured sons had ever even seen Him? – or be denounced as traitor. Heretic.
	No, that wasn’t right again. 
	Great pains had been taken to assert the empirical fact that the Emperor was not a god. There were no gods. 
	The propagators, the pamphleteers, had not been seen or heard from again. Idolatry was to be stamped out – science and reason were the future; logic would bring the human race to its apex, and yet… there were whispers.
	And what of the other choice? Horus. Warmonger, planet-killer, ruthless demagogue of a bloody crusade allied to old religion, old faith. The smear campaign had been waged with military brutality on Terra. Vilified, demonised, Horus was a monster, a thing of childhood nightmares. How quickly the gilded could fall. 
	‘Be still,’ said the cobalt giant.
	Persephia could barely hear her own thoughts above the droning engines, let alone her actual voice. The giant had heard her as easily as if they were engaged in polite conversation in a quiet room. And his voice had carried with all the force of a thunderclap.
	‘My lord?’
	‘I said, be still,’ the giant repeated. He had a stylised ‘U’ on his chest plate. A curved helmet, with a vox-grille for a mouth and cold crimson lenses, sat mag-locked to his thigh. Even without his full complement of weapons, secure in the ship’s locker, he was still formidable.
	‘The vessel you’re riding in is a Stormbird – though, it scarcely resembles one any more – it has endured harder journeys.’ 
	Persephia was humble and contrite. ‘Yes, my lord. I’m sorry.’ 
	Seemingly satisfied, the warrior shifted back in his grav-harness but was no less threatening. Bionics beneath his armour whirred as he moved, betraying old injuries. It was why the giant had missed out on front-line duties and part of the reason Persephia accompanied him. She had once been an artisan, but since the Edict of Dissolution her role as a remembrancer was a memory long dead. War had come to the galaxy and Persephia’s talents were put to the forge like the rest of the human race.
	No one wanted to remember any more.
	A bout of turbulence rocked the ship, causing Persephia to stumble.
	The pilot’s voice came from the cockpit through the vox.
	‘Entering Bastion’s atmosphere. Experiencing wind shear. Attempting to correct.’
	Persephia’s gaze alighted on the cobalt giant. His eyes were closed, his respiration barely visible in the movement of his chest.
	‘I am not supposed to be here, not like this.’ She clenched her fists tightly, willing the turbulence to abate.
	‘You and I have something in common, human. Neither of us should be here. We’ve both been left behind.’ His eyes snapped open, tainted with hurt and anger. ‘Heka’tan’s meditations are almost over. He will have need of his armour.’ The giant closed his eyes again as the artificer moved towards the back of the ship. His sonorous voice followed her.
	‘Forgotten… both of us.’
	III
	Heka’tan was naked but for a pair of training fatigues. He had prepared the ash and the brazier. He had observed the rites and warmed the branding iron. The flame was born in the cradle, and within its blazing grasp he found purity and a sense of truth. Repressed memory came with it…
	The drop-ship was taking fire from all sides. Much of its armour plating was punched through by lascannon blasts and several of its heavy bolter armaments were destroyed. Heat emanated from the interior. Shadows lurked there, of broken bodies silhouetted a visceral red from the incendiary fires inside. The guts of the ship lay strewn across the Isstvan plain where a cloying fug of smoke roiled. Hot tracer whickered through air screaming with the discharge of bolters and heavy cannon. Somewhere in the distance, by a shrouded ridgeline, an explosion blossomed. 
	‘Ta… king… vy… ire…’ The broken vox report crackled in Heka’tan’s ear.
	‘Gravius! Is that you, brother?’ 
	‘Affir… mative, brother… aptain…’
	‘Fall back immediately and assume defensive postures.’ 
	Around him, the fight was intensifying. Gunfire, scores of overlapping bolter bursts, rose to a deafening frenzy. Enemy cohorts were massing from the east and west, and advancing on their position. 
	Enemy cohorts.
	The notion was insane, a crazed nightmare brought to life on a dead world with only the dead to witness it. For surely, that’s what they all were.
	‘Brother… aptain…’ There was a pause not caused by the static interference. 
	Figures were resolving through the artificial fog. Their hulking forms wore the colour of hard steel, of grey unyielding metal. Iron.
	The Urgall Depression was no place for a last stand. The ravine resembled a charnel field and not a place about which great deeds were sung. There would be no glory, face down in the blood-drenched tundra slain by one’s own brothers.
	Gravius continued and for once the link was clean. ‘What’s happening?’
	Heka’tan had three hundred and sixty-two Legiones Astartes left in his command. They had forged a ring around the shattered drop-ship. Over half that number again was forever entombed inside their vessel, lost before the fight had even begun, a fight the brother-captain didn’t understand. 
	‘Assume defensive postures,’ he answered, for want of something better, something that made sense. 
	The line of iron opened up with its weapons. Fusillade met fusillade as both sides engaged, hundreds of muzzle flares ripping up the smoke like jagged knives of hot light. 
	It was but a skirmish in a maelstrom of death. This was a battle like no other. It was a reckoning. It was a show of force. But above all else it was fratricide on an epic scale.
	Heka’tan’s words to Gravius sounded hollow even to him. ‘Hold out as long as you can.’ 
	It was over. Even before he’d seen the armoured column advancing behind the infantry, Heka’tan knew it. He took a round to the shoulder, the explosive impact nearly tearing off the pad and spinning him. A second struck him in the chest and he staggered. 
	One of his own, Ikon he thought, died to a throat wound. More followed, too numerous and rapid to count. Apothecaries were a pointless luxury during this nascent massacre. The air shimmered with the heat of shells passing so close that some struck one another and deviated from their original targets. Above, Thunderhawks and Stormbirds tried to escape. Heka’tan saw several in the livery of the Raven Guard and Iron Hands plunge from the smoke-blackened sky like broken comets. Distant explosions announced their destruction. 
	Bleak was not the word for their chances.
	Fatalism, yes, but capitulation was not amongst Heka’tan’s emotional vocabulary. Sons of Nocturne were born of sterner stock. They came from the earth and its fiery heart-blood. They would not go to Mount Deathfire with the foe unbloodied. 
	‘Burn them!’
	A wave of super-heated promethium spewed from the Salamanders’ serried ranks. Several Iron Warriors fell to the flamers, first going to their knees before collapsing onto the shell-strewn earth. 
	It wasn’t enough. More were coming. Tongues of fire spilled off their armour like bright vapour contrails. They brought autocannon and multi-lasers, Rapier and Tarantula guns. 
	Brother killed brother in an endless firestorm that had yet to even reach its full fury.
	Now, the long turrets of the battle tanks made themselves known. It was easy to imagine skulls being crushed beneath their tracks, the slow and steady disintegration of civilisations under their massive bulk. Kill markings marred their hulls. How many would be attributed to the Salamanders Legion before this madness was done, Heka’tan wondered? 
	The tanks were still manoeuvring into position when the Son of N’bel fell upon the line of iron, bending it to his will. A gleaming figure surged into the Iron Warriors, distant but still magnificent. Vulkan and the Pyre Guard slammed into the betrayers with unrelenting vengeance. The primarch’s hammer smashed a bloody wedge into the throng, slow to react to the flank attack. 
	From below, Heka’tan found it hard to keep track of his father, but saw enough to know iron helms were sundered and chestplates crushed against his wrath. A spit of flame drove the traitors back up the hill, colliding with the advancing armour. Vulkan’s gauntlet engulfed them in a conflagration so intense that power armour was no defence against it. 
	He reached the first of the battle tanks, a Demolisher that the primarch lifted with his bare hands and turned over. A second he punched through the hull with his hammer, wrenching out the crew within before the Pyre Guard, his retinue and inner circle warriors, followed up with grenades. The back of the tank blew out in a plume of fire, smoke and shrapnel. 
	Then Heka’tan was running, back up the hill towards his father.
	‘Forward in the name of Lord Vulkan! Unto the anvil!’
	The ring of three hundred took up the charge, ragged banners snapping defiantly in the icy wind. Snow turned to slush with the heat of their flamers, levelled at the crumbling line of Iron Warriors. 
	‘Perturabo!’ The voice shook the very ridgeline as deep and forbidding as a Nocturnean lava chasm. Vulkan was enraged, battering tanks aside like children’s toys. He was not the most gifted swordsman, nor was he a master strategist or a psyker of any note, but his strength and fortitude… in that, the Eighteenth Primarch was unrivalled. 
	Had Ferrus Manus lived there might be cause for debate, but with the Iron Hands primarch’s head lying separate from his body in the shrinking snow that point was now moot. 
	The low whine of a missile barrage cutting through the air at speed answered Vulkan and he looked to the heavens.
	Heka’tan followed his primarch’s gaze a second later and saw the danger too late. 
	Fury lit up the ridgeline, ripping tanks and bodies the same, tossing Salamanders and Iron Warriors indiscriminately. The backwash boiled down the hill in a fiery bloom, thundering into Heka’tan just as Vulkan was obliterated from his sight. Then the world faded, darkening in every sense and–
	–he awoke.
	Something was scratching at the Salamander’s fingers. The efforts were frantic but ineffective. Heka’tan opened his eyes, still shaking. His hand was clenched around a woman’s throat. Eyes narrowed, he released her. 
	‘What are you doing here?’ He rose from his haunches but the artificer backed off when he tried to approach her. She massaged her throat, trying to breathe. 
	The skin around her neck was already bruising and there were burn marks where Heka’tan’s fingers still carried the brazier’s heat. 
	‘Brother Arcadese…’
	‘Should not have sent you.’ Heka’tan glowered. 
	The artificer shook her head. ‘What did I do?’ She was raving a little now, afraid and a little incensed. 
	Heka’tan rose to his full height, and loomed over her. ‘The rites of Nocturne are for Vulkan’s sons alone.’ There was obvious reproach in his voice. The artificer’s annoyance melted away with the sudden fire blazing in the Salamander’s eyes. They were red but stoked like a furnace. The effect, coupled with the warrior’s ebon skin, was disturbing. ‘Nor do we have use for artificers.’ He would speak to Arcadese later.
	‘You’re my first Salamander,’ she admitted, mustering her courage in the face of the diabolic warrior.
	‘Then you’re fortunate, for there are few of us left.’ Heka’tan turned away. ‘Now leave me. A Salamander must be fire-touched before battle.’
	‘Battle? I thought this was a diplomatic mission?’
	The Salamander glared at her. ‘Do I look like a diplomat to you?’ 
	‘No, my lord.’
	‘Don’t call me that. I am not your lord, I merely am. Now, go.’
	A sudden jolt through the chamber sent the artificer scurrying for footing. Heka’tan caught her. His grip was gentle this time. 
	A vox crackle made them both turn towards the receiver unit on the wall. The frantic voice of the pilot quickly followed.
	‘…vasive action… brace for… mpact!’
	‘Huh–’ The half-formed thought was smothered by the explosion rocking the hull and the blast wave ripping through the ceiling. 
	Heka’tan bore down on Persephia like the coming of night.
	Then came smoke and the scent of burning.
	Debris
	I
	The sleek vessel touched down with barely a tremor. Its long silver prow shone in the setting Bastion sun, slightly at odds with the functional grey and bronze of the docking towers. This was not a sleek, smooth shipyard; it was a place of hard edges, of logical, minimalist architecture, of sprawling technological megaliths and super-rigs.
	Servitors, haulers, deckers, overseers and foremen clogged companionways, thronged dizzyingly high gantries and lofty work platforms. This was industry. It was grind and solidity. This was Bastion. 
	Cullis was its prime-clave. A hard city, full of hard men, not just workers and engineers but military men, and it was their might and native arsenal that had afforded them choice.
	No real opposition to a Legion, Bastion none the less represented an expenditure of time, a manoeuvring of resources – a surfeit that neither side was willing to commit. Armies were stretched the length and breadth of the galaxy as it was. Better to court its people with words and argument than risk turning Bastion into a wasteland that was no use to either faction.
	Ortane Vorkellen knew this as he stepped onto the gangramp of his cutter, shielding his gaze against the dipping sun. 
	‘Smells of oil and metal,’ muttered Insk, his scrivener. ‘Should’ve brought rebreathers.’
	‘And risk offending the natives,’ Vorkellen returned in a quiet voice, his painted smile pitched perfectly for the greeting party. 
	A gaggle of archivists, lex-savants and codifiers followed him and Insk down the ramp as they descended to the deck floor. 
	‘Greetings, travellers,’ uttered a moustachioed clave-noble. He towered over the visitors in a bespoke rigger, an exo-skeletal frame of bronze that added a metre to his height and bulked out his limbs with its chassis. Weapon mounts, ordinarily positioned at either shoulder and below the abdominals, were absent, a concession that this was to be a peaceful engagement. Likewise, the noble’s three marshals wore only ceremonial flash-sabres – no barb-whips, no rotor-threshers or other hand-held cannon. A high-marshalaccompanied them, making five men in total.
	The Bastionites were a people that appreciated all things martial. Perhaps that was why compliance had been so easy to achieve here, despite the world’s obvious military might – they respected strength and knew its measure well. Certainly Perturabo’s Legion had experienced harder-fought, longer campaigns than the one to assimilate Bastion and its annexe-worlds. They had simply recognised the power of the Space Marines and sworn fealty then and there without the expected siege. A contingent of Iron Warriors had been left behind, presumably to garrison the planet, but had left prior to the outbreak of the war with no reason given. Their primarch’s influence was still felt, however, in the statues of Perturabo that rose from the cities like spires.
	‘Greetings from the clave,’ added the noble. His russet and silver jacket was pressed and pristine, perfectly accenting the polished bronze of his exo-rigger. His boots, fastened in the machine’s stirrups, were black and shining. 
	Vorkellen had never been to Bastion, but he had researched the world and its customs. He knew the clave represented the socio-political-martial inner circle of the world’s infrastructure and that every one of Bastion’s nine continents, be they ice-plain, desert flatland or mountain fastness, adhered to the will and guidance of a clave. A naturally occurring thermo-nuclear resource provided light and heat, heavily shielded and stockpiled in underground silos that ran throughout Bastion like arteries. Cullis was the capital and the prime-clave, which was why Vorkellen had travelled there for the negotiations. 
	‘My lord brings you greeting and honours the clave,’ he replied, bowing at the foot of the gangramp in the custom befitting obeisance to a clave-noble of Bastion. ‘Lord Horus conveys through me his gratitude at this meeting.’
	The noble nodded. ‘It is received and noted by Cullis-Clave. Please follow.’ He turned then, his exo-rigger whirring with servos and pistons and pneumatics, and proceeded to clank across the dock towards a great mechanised gate. It was magnificent on account of its size and the inner workings, displayed like a body’s perfect organs on a mortician’s slab. But it was ultimately artless and cold. 
	Vorkellen followed, his lackeys in tow. ‘You’ve prepared our petition?’ he asked Insk.
	The scrivener proffered the data-slate to his master. 
	Vorkellen took it and proceeded to read. The guards, high-marshal and clave-noble paid them no heed, eyes front and marching to the rapidly approaching gate.
	The visitors were shown into a long gallery festooned with banners and laurels. 
	‘This is where you’ll await audience with the clave-nobles,’ the high-marshal said. 
	As he was taking in the austere surroundings, Vorkellen asked, ‘Have the representatives from Terra arrived yet?’
	‘They are delayed.’
	‘Doubtless the Emperor would prefer a show of overwhelming force to bend the clave’s will.’
	The high-marshal scowled. ‘You will get your opportunity to present your case to the clave in due course.’ 
	‘Of course, sire. I merely hope to settle this matter of allegiance quickly,’ he replied contritely. A pity we cannot unleash the World Eaters on this place and raze it, he thought behind a strong smile that spoke of his sterling character and honourable ideals. 
	The high-marshal saluted – a gesture curiously similar to the old sign of Unification, a clenched fist striking the chest. ‘The clave convenes in two hours and thirteen minutes.’
	Horus’s iterator smiled again, this time it was thinner, like an adder’s lipless mouth. 
	Even Erebus couldn’t pull this off as well as me, he thought, hubris overflowing. 
	‘We’ll be ready,’ he promised. 
	II
	The Stormbird’s side hatch burst open with a well placed kick. The portal was drooling smoke as a broad, flame-limned silhouette filled it. 
	Arcadese was wearing his battle-helm and had the pilot’s body slung over his shoulder. The human was blood-stained, his fingers and hair blackened by soot. 
	The angle was wrong as he reached the hatch’s threshold. The Stormbird had hit nose-first, crumpling its cockpit and breaking off portions of wing. Fuselage and engine components lay scattered in the wake of their descent like entrails. A dozen fires ravaged the hull but they were burning out. 
	Arcadese leapt from the hatch, landing squarely a few metres from the wreck. The ground yielded underfoot and the Ultramarine sank a few centimetres. The lights and industry of Cullis were pinpricks on the horizon, no more than an hour’s march away. In the distance he could see the stilts lifting the platforms and rigs above the grey-brown ash sump surrounding it. It was a petro-chemical mulch, redolent of power plant refuse and engine yard effluvia. 
	He set the pilot down and returned to the ship. 
	‘Salamander,’ he called into the dissipating smoke. Emergency lighting flickered. 
	A figure emerged from the smog, another smaller one in his arms. 
	‘I’m here.’ The artificer was cradled in Heka’tan’s arms. Her eyes were red-ringed and stinging, and she coughed. 
	A word resolved in Arcadese’s mind when he saw her: Burden.
	‘What of the others?’ Heka’tan asked, stomping into the light halo from the broken hatch.
	‘One survivor. Outside. Where is your armour, brother?’
	‘Within,’ said Heka’tan. 
	Arcadese reached for the woman. ‘Give her to me. Go retrieve your armour and our weapons. We may not be on neutral soil after all.’
	Heka’tan handed the female over and headed back into the carnage of the ship. 
	III
	An awkward silence persisted between Arcadese and the artificer. 
	‘How will we get back?’ she asked at last.
	‘I don’t know.’
	‘Were we attacked?’
	‘It appears likely.’
	She glanced around the industrial sump fearfully. ‘Are we safe here?’
	‘I doubt it.’
	‘Will we–’
	‘Cease with your questions!’ The Ultramarine turned his steel gaze on her and Persephia shrank a little.
	‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘I was trained to question… when I was asked to remember.’
	Arcadese looked away, his face like stone. ‘Not any more,’ he stated flatly and resumed his vigil outside the broken ship. 
	IV
	Arcadese was relieved when Heka’tan emerged at the hatch carrying two bulky munitions crates. Each was Legion-stamped, the Eighteenth and Thirteenth respectively. He tossed them onto the ground, one after the other, and leapt out. 
	Heka’tan frowned when he saw Persephia. ‘Is she injured?’ 
	‘She’s human, brother – that is all,’ Arcadese replied, busy with unlocking the crate. He smiled at the sleek, gunmetal stock, the spare clips cushioned in tight-fitting foam. Running his gauntleted hand across the bolter, he found the grip and tugged the weapon free. 
	‘Are you hurt?’ Heka’tan asked the artificer.
	‘I’m fine,’ she snapped, whirling to face him. She wiped at her tears. ‘I’m fine. Just let me do my work.’
	Arcadese was about to intercede when Heka’tan stopped him. ‘Leave her.’ 
	The Ultramarine snorted, shucking the bolter around his shoulder on its strap. ‘There’s no threat out here, brother.’ He pointed towards Cullis. ‘Our enemies are in there.’
	Heka’tan had started to pull on the mesh under-layer of his power armour. He allowed Persephia to assist with some of the rear-mounted joints and clasps. ‘These are peaceful negotiations, Arcadese.’
	‘You of all people should know the falsehood of that.’
	Heka’tan didn’t answer.
	‘We are forgotten sons, you and I,’ Arcadese continued, ‘you by the Imperium and I by my Legion. To be revived from a coma and faced with this… Nikaea, Isstvan V, our beloved Warmaster a traitor – it is beyond comprehension. I should be at Calth with my father and brothers, not on this backwater world, playing diplomat.’
	Heka’tan attached his greaves and chest plate in silence. 
	An incredulous grunt from the Ultramarine made the Salamander look up. 
	‘Don’t you want vengeance?’ Arcadese asked.
	He was referring to Isstvan and the massacre.
	‘I don’t know what I want. Duty will suffice for now.’
	Arcadese approximated a shrug and went to retrieve the prone pilot.
	‘Leave him.’
	The Ultramarine stopped, looking to Heka’tan for clarification.
	‘He’s dead.’
	V
	There was a jagged tear in the fuselage, fringed by incendiary burns. ‘I’ve seen a lot of downed ships. This looks like outside in rather than inside out.’
	‘Indeed,’ Heka’tan replied. With Persephia’s help he was fully armoured, a forest-green monolith.
	Arcadese was nearby and could barely contain his anger. ‘We were shot down.’ He wanted retribution.
	Heka’tan could relate to that. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it now.’
	‘What about her?’ Arcadese gestured to the artificer who stood a way back from the wreck, her head bowed.
	‘She’s coming with us.’
	‘She’ll slow us down.’
	‘Then consider it a mercy that no one else survived.’ The rest of the small crew were all dead. ‘I’ll carry her if needs be.’
	With an all human crew, the Stormbird had been retrofitted and re-appropriated as a diplomatic vessel, shedding armour and weapons for private chambers, archives and sleeping quarters. Considering the condition of the wreck, Heka’tan wondered at the wisdom of those measures now. 
	‘This work,’said Arcadese at length,‘does not honour warriors.’
	‘We are warriors no longer,’ Heka’tan answered, tired of the Ultramarine’s dissatisfaction, and traced his finger down the jagged blast gouge.
	Arcadese stalked off, ignoring the artificer. ‘Do what your conscience dictates, brother.’
	Heka’tan was no longer listening. He dwelled on the broken Stormbird. It reminded him of another damaged vessel, on another battlefield…
	…They were fleeing the landing zone, Stormbirds little more than armoured pyres with his brothers inside. 
	He was being dragged. Lucidity eluded him, ears ringing with the sound of the blast. 
	Burned into his mind, Heka’tan saw his father engulfed by fire and death. For a moment he panicked, and struggled against the two Salamanders hauling him. 
	‘Where is he? What happened? Why are we leaving?’
	He tried to get free but he was too weak. His armour was broken and bloody. 
	A beaked battle-helm, the forest-green streaked with arterial crimson, looked down at him. ‘He is gone, brother.’
	‘What? No!’ Heka’tan struggled again, but a jolt of pain from his injuries crippled his efforts. ‘We have to go back.’
	‘There is no back. There is nothing there. Vulkan is gone.’
	Railing that they had to turn around, they had to find him, Heka’tan passed out and saw only darkness.
	Suddenly aware of being watched, Heka’tan came to and looked around. A landman, one of the labour-claves that worked the sump farms at the periphery of Bastion’s major cities, stood watching him. He wore a rebreather, anti-rad coat and sumper-boots. In his left hand, he carried a tilling-stave used to test the depth of sump-ash. 
	The landman, never before looking upon such a warrior, nodded.
	Persephia had gone after Arcadese. Heka’tan nodded back, then went after them.
	Negotiation
	I
	‘Relinquish your weapons, brother.’ 
	Heka’tan kept his voice calm and level inside the gallery. Beyond it, through a vast stone doorway, was the auditorium where Bastion’s clave-nobles would hear their petition. As well as being sealed for the duration of the proceedings, weapons were strictly forbidden in the chamber.
	It was a fact the Ultramarine didn’t take well.
	‘A Legiones Astartes does not surrender his arms. Prise my weapon from my cold, dead fingers – that is the only way a warrior of Ultramar would give up his bolter, so says my Lord Guilliman.’ 
	‘And my Lord Vulkan counsels temperance in the face of impasse. That pragmatism not pride is the solution to seemingly irreconcilable discord.’ Heka’tan unloaded his bolter clip and sprang a shell from the breech before handing it over to a sanctum-marshal. ‘Relinquish it, Arcadese. We cannot negotiate armed and armoured. Nor can we go back.’
	The Stormbird was destroyed, and the march through the sump swamp had done nothing to improve Arcadese’s mood, even though Heka’tan had carried the artificer to speed their progress. 
	‘We will be defenceless.’ 
	Heka’tan returned a carefully impassive expression. ‘A warrior of the Legion is never defenceless, brother.’ 
	‘Cold, dead fingers, remember. I am an Angel of Death. I am death.’
	Heavier-armoured marshals entered the gallery and levelled rotator-cannons at the Ultramarine.
	Arcadese drew his combat blade with a belligerent shriek of steel. ‘To take arms against one is to take arms against all the Legiones Astartes!’
	A stern grip on his wrist brought more anger but stopped any potential bloodshed in the making.
	Heka’tan’s hold was unflinching. His red eyes blazed with captured fire. ‘Think. Any killing here won’t further our cause, it will end it… And us. Use the wisdom your father gave you.’
	Though reluctant, Arcadese saw sense and relented. Scowling at the relieved marshals, he relinquished his weapons.
	He was about to move forwards into the auditorium when a pair of marshals blocked his path.
	Arcadese glared at them. 
	‘Now what?’
	‘Your armour, too,’ said the high-marshal from behind him.
	The Ultramarine shook his head and gave Heka’tan a rueful look as he unclasped a gauntlet. ‘This gets better.’ 
	Persephia moved in to assist him. 
	‘See that they are well tended,’ Arcadese said in a threatening undertone. The artificer merely nodded, carefully removing a vambrace. 
	The high-marshal looked on. ‘Who speaks for the Imperium?’
	‘I will,’ said Arcadese. He’d removed his breastplate and pulled the torso portion of his mesh under-layer away. Grotesque bionics were revealed beneath, a legacy of Ullanor where he’d fallen in battle to the greenskin. He’d been comatose and hadn’t witnessed the Emperor’s last war, his greatest victory. Instead, he’d awoken to a world that no longer made any sense. 
	Heka’tan smiled, starting to remove his own battle-plate. ‘Can’t you tell he’s the natural negotiator?’
	II
	They stood before the clave-nobles wearing borrowed robes. 
	‘We are a sight to stir even the Sigillite to laughter,’ Arcadese had remarked upon their apotheosis to diplomats.
	Persephia had rejoined them later, having disappeared with the equipment to ensure it was properly stored. 
	Though they still wore their boots and mesh leggings, the fact of being unarmoured still rankled at the Ultramarine and he took the artificer to one side when she returned. ‘I need you to do something for me…’
	The rest of his request was lost to the sound of the great doors to the auditorium closing behind them. 
	After a loud, concussive boom, a quintet of sombre figures emerged in the sepulchral gloom. They were under-lit by a dimmed lantern array that cast haunting shadows over their faces, and seated on a dark balcony. In a gallery looking down on the auditorium floor and the petitioners was a host of shadow-veiled faces – lesser nobles of Bastion, their politicians and leaders. Judges all.
	In the darkness, the vast auditorium’s form was only hinted at. Heka’tan discerned more hard edges, square and functional. The air smelled of stone and steel. The chamber was much more than its name suggested. It had multiple levels, corridors and conduits. Labyrinthine, the auditorium was just a part, and a small one at that. The Salamander’s gaze rested on the other petitioners.
	‘Hard to believe Horus sent an iterator and not a Legion.’
	Arcadese looked over at the oleaginous men and women clustered around a besuited central figure. ‘I thought the enemy had disbanded the remembrancers, like us.’
	‘Horus is a conqueror, brother. He wants his victories to become a part of history.’
	‘Aye,’ Arcadese agreed, bile rising in his throat at the sight of the craven humans, ‘he seeks immortality, and to assert his cause is righteous.’
	Heka’tan muttered, ‘Tell that to my cold brothers on Isstvan.’
	The Ultramarine was only half-listening. His gaze went to a benighted balcony, high in the auditorium’s vaults opposite the clave-nobles. ‘Don’t be sure the Warmaster hasn’t sent warriors. Our ship didn’t crash itself.’
	A brazier ignited with azure flame, ending the conversation on a tense note, and illuminated the form of the high-marshal standing in the middle of the auditorium floor.
	‘All attend,’ he boomed, his voice augmented by a vox-hailer unit attached to his mouth like breathing apparatus. ‘Senate is in session.’
	Arcadese scowled at the ceremony. Fighting the ork would be preferable to this. ‘Take me back to Ullanor,’ he grumbled.
	III
	Vorkellen affected a serious and professional air. Inwardly, he was ecstatic. This was his battlefield, a war in which even against the Legion he had the surer footing. 
	He eyed the Ultramarine briefly. ‘I will destroy you,’ he whispered. He needed no Legionaries. What use were they? All their strength and power would only go so far; hearts and minds could not be manipulated by brawn. 
	‘The Emperor sends warriors to do the work of ambassadors,’ Insk smirked. 
	‘Indeed,’ Vorkellen agreed, averting his gaze when he noticed the Salamander was looking at him. ‘An abject failure.’ He chuckled mirthlessly. To see them humbled, without arms or armour, was delicious.
	The clave-nobles were addressing the assembly, explaining to all that this was a negotiation to decide the fealty of Bastion and its armies, for Horus or the Emperor. Both sides were permitted to petition for their allegiance and based on their arguments Bastion would make its choice. The losers would be granted immunity until they had returned to their starships, then they would be considered an enemy combatant and treated as such.
	As they arrived first, the representatives of Horus were permitted to speak first.
	As the high-marshal retreated into the shadows, Vorkellen stepped forwards. 
	‘Our Lord Horus is portrayed as a monster and a tyrant by some. That is not so. He is a warmaster, a warrior-general who seeks only to unify mankind under a single rule. Pledge your allegiance to Horus and become part of that unity,’ he said, ‘I will tell you of tyrants, of butchers and massacres most foul. On Monarchia, where the Emperor’s hubris turned to madness…’
	IV
	High up in the vaulted auditorium echelons, far from the audience, a shadow stirred. Ready and in position, it contented itself to watch. For now.
	Tyrants
	I
	Vorkellen thrust out an arm, ‘Behold.’ 
	A hololithic image materialised in front of him from a sub-projector in the auditorium floor. It depicted a glorious city of temples, spires and cathedra. Even in the flickering haze of the hololith’s resolution it was possible to pick out statues of the Emperor, great arches of veneration carved in his image. 
	‘Monarchia…’ Vorkellen said again, leaving a pregnant pause, ‘…before the Legion of Roboute Guilliman levelled it.’ 
	A second projection crackled to life, replacing the first. This was of a sundered ruin, little more than a smoking crater where civilisation had once existed. Bodies were strewn across the wreckage, those too foolish or adamant, or too afraid, to leave.
	‘Devastation.’ Vorkellen announced it like a death knell. ‘And for what reason? Why was this massacre sanctioned by the Emperor, beloved of all?’ He opened his hands in a plaintive gesture. ‘Love. The people of Monarchia dared to show their love for their Master of Mankind, they dared to honour and revere him, and this was their reward – death.’
	He eyed the Legionaries, his gaze studiously accusing. This was their fault too. They were his warriors, his butchers. 
	‘And look,’ said Vorkellen, his eyes going to the Imperial representatives, ‘one of the Ultramarines warriors is with us. The Thirteenth Legion, those who consider themselves above all others, the very template that their fellow Space Marines should aspire to conform too, are the slayers of innocent women and children.’ 
	II
	Arcadese glared, observing the self-assured gait, the undercurrent of arrogance in the iterator’s expression, the finery of his attire and the many expensive rejuvenat surgeries employed to preserve his youth. Vanity and confidence bled off him like an invisible fluid. 
	He clenched a fist. It was his Legion at Monarchia, though he himself had not been present. 
	‘Stay calm, brother,’ whispered Heka’tan. ‘He is trying to anger you.’
	Arcadese nodded. He would not rise to it. All eyes turned to the Ultramarine then, inviting his riposte.
	‘The citizens of Monarchia were given ample time to evacuate. We are not monsters. We–’
	The iterator cut in. ‘So the Thirteenth Legion did not perpetrate the destruction of Monarchia and the subsequent massacre of much of its population?’
	‘They were warned,’ Arcadese growled. ‘Monarchia practiced proscribed religion. Idolatry is the path to damnation. They would not see the light.’
	‘An intriguing turn of phrase,’ Vorkellen bit back. ‘Isn’t religion the true path to enlightenment?’
	‘It is not a question of theological debate. This is law. Monarchia was–’
	‘And who laid down these edicts, these commandments that all of mankind shall adhere to upon pain of brutal sanction? Was it the Emperor?’
	‘You know it was.’
	‘And so tell me this, also. Who was it that the people of Monarchia were revering that such stern measures be taken against them? Some despot’s graven image, a demagogue of a corrupt and baseless faith, or worse, perhaps a denizen of Old Night?’
	‘They worshipped the Emperor.’
	‘He who lays down his laws from on high, he who created the most formidable fighting force the galaxy has ever known through science and gene-craft, this… being, who taught men how to span the great gulf of the galaxy and can kill with a thought, this is the one they honoured?’
	Arcadese spoke through gritted teeth. ‘Yes.’
	Vorkellen snorted his impatience and turned to his audience. ‘How can you trust an Emperor who punishes those that worship him, that makes hypocritical decrees? Is this the Imperium you wish to serve?’
	There were mutterings from the shadows and even the five high-nobles swapped remarks and glared seriously at the Ultramarine.
	‘Those people were given seven days to evacuate the city. Faith is dangerous; it unlocks the road to destruction.’
	‘Spoken like a true fanatic,’ Vorkellen replied. ‘This is the reward the Emperor offers for your loyalty. He sends his Legions to murder and burn and sunder. It is the fate that awaits you should Bastion side with the Imperium.’ 
	He paused and his voice changed. It was level, matter of fact, infused with irrefutable truth. ‘Horus did not rebel against an absent father; he opposed a tyrant, masquerading as a pacifist and a benevolent ruler.’
	‘Lies!’ Arcadese’s voice echoed loudly, betraying his anger.
	A shocked silence filled the auditorium. 
	Heka’tan shifted uneasily behind him. ‘Brother…’
	Arcadese unclenched his fist. The Ultramarine opened his mouth to speak but could find no words. It was heresy, wasn’t it? That was why Monarchia burned. It was a lesser evil to prevent a greater one. It was…
	‘My apologies.’
	The eyes of the entire assembly aligned on the Ultramarine, heavy with the weight of judgement. 
	One of the high-nobles gave their disdain a voice. ‘Then prepare your next words carefully.’
	Arcadese nodded stiffly, glancing daggers at the iterator. He turned and hissed at Heka’tan, ‘I knew this was folly.’
	‘It is barely begun, brother. Have patience.’ He looked around. ‘Where did you send the artificer?’
	‘To watch over my bolter and blade. We may need them before this farce is over, if only to skewer Horus’s pampered snake.’ 
	Heka’tan was about to reply when his gaze was drawn inexplicably to the upper echelons of the chamber. 
	III
	The shadow figure hiding on the balcony shifted slightly. The red-eyed one was looking at it. For a moment it thought it was discovered and its hand strayed towards the rifle. Then the warrior turned away and the shadow figure relaxed. Not yet… not yet…
	IV
	Persephia had been an excellent artisan. Before the Edict of Dissolution, she had been a sculptor – it made the transition to artificer easier. It also meant she wasn’t pressed into the service of the Imperial Army or sent into the manufactorums to make shells and bombs. She heard about the conditions of those places, of the relentless overseers that made men and women into the blood-gruel of the Imperial war machine. Gone was the era of hope, of glorious conquest she’d longed to be a part of – in its place reigned an age of darkness instead. 
	The armoury where the Legionaries’ equipment was being kept was directly below the auditorium in a
sub-level. As unthreatening as she was, the guards allowed her passage into the darkened under-deeps without question. Their attention was wholly fixed on the two massive warriors addressing the clave. 
	The words of her master returned to her.
	I need you to bring me my weapons. Smuggle them back into the auditorium – no one will pay you any attention – and put them somewhere I can easily find them.
	She’d nodded, not daring to question the cobalt giant. 
	Our ship was attacked, you know that. There are enemies on Bastion. I believe they want to kill us and tip these negotiations in the Warmaster’s favour. I would not have us exposed. 
	She’d headed off after that, fearful of what she might discover.
	Cold, grey stone and struts of functional steel lined the corridors below the auditorium. There were anterooms and chambers, mainly stores or vast offices cluttered with slates and papers. The armoury was ahead and Persephia was still trying to work out how she would smuggle out one of the Ultramarine’s massive weapons when a light prickling heat assailed her skin and nostrils. It was heady, and if she strained she could hear the droning of machinery. 
	She continued to her destination but found more guards outside the corridor to the armoury that hadn’t been there before. She ducked into an alcove before she was seen and after a minute decided to double back. She couldn’t get through that way but perhaps she could go around and find a different route in. 
	Another corridor led off from the main, grey artery. It was here that the machine-drone was loudest, so she followed it hoping it might bring her out on the opposite side and let her slip past the guards.
	The further Persephia went, the louder the sound became. Some kind of vast machinery she could only guess at. Soon the barren walls and struts gave way to engines and pipes and conduits. There were temperature gauges and funnels, oblong chambers shielded by many-layered plascrete. A throbbing nexus of energy glowed somewhere beneath her. She had reached the end of the tunnel and found herself standing at the edge of a circular chasm ringed by gantries. 
	Bizarrely, the way was open. None of the gates this far down were locked and there were no further guards she could see. Intermittently, she came across slumped gun-drones but the cyb-organics were deactivated.
	Labour servitors moved back and forth, though, engrossed in menial tasks. Persephia moved around them gingerly, careful not to interrupt their routines or touch them, as she descended. The heat was increasing. Patches of sweat darkened her underarms and a veneer of perspiration circled her brow. 
	She saw a servitor at work by one of the consoles. A bank of screens displayed some of the other geothermal nuclear sites on Bastion. They all looked disturbingly alike. Persephia moved on, drawn by curiosity and the distant nuclear glow coming closer. 
	Someone was moving below her. Not a servitor – its movements were not syncopated enough. Too large as well, and much bigger than one of the cyb-organic drones. It worked at one of the consoles, attaching something. Persephia was too far away to see what it was. Something about the figure made her pause. She felt disquieted as she watched its bulk shifting subtly in its work. 
	She suddenly realised why there were no active guards, why the route to the nuclear core was open. Persephia wondered how far up the auditorium level now was and how far away. She’d lost track of time.
	There was danger here. Her instincts screamed it. To let the figure see her was to invite that trouble to her. It was to invite death.
	A bead of sweat ran down Persephia’s brow and into her eye. She gasped.
	The figure looked up, hard eyes glaring through crimson lenses. It was grey; grey like the walls. The figure’s armour was fringed in a dirty gold and a skull icon emblazoned its left shoulder guard like an omen. It saw the woman and crouched. 
	It took Persephia a few seconds to realise what was happening. Boosting from a squat position, the figure had climbed the gantry immediately above. Then it repeated the motion and did the same again. Underfoot, the metal shook her. 
	She ran. 
	Another tremor rippled through the gantry, stronger this time, perhaps only a few levels down. Clanking footfalls followed, resonating behind her, and Persephia realised the figure was now pursuing directly. She heard the hard chank of metal slamming against metal and ducked behind a servitor. A second later there was an almighty boom and the menial exploded in a shower of bone and machine-parts. 
	Persephia picked up the pace. Her ears were still ringing. Death was behind her. It wore a face of iron and she couldn’t outrun it. 
	A hard engine growl assaulted her ears, as the sheer size of the Iron Warrior engulfed her. 
	The engine growl became a wet churn and then a scream as Persephia let out her death cry. She spat a torrent of blood over her clothes and then her slayer before her eyes became glassy and still. 
	Enemies Among Us
	I
	Heka’tan was listening to more of the iterator’s diatribes against the Imperium and the Emperor, watching Arcadese slowly losing his cool. His mood was agitated too, but for a different reason. 
	‘She’s been gone too long.’ 
	Arcadese half-turned as he heard the Salamander begin to move. ‘Where are you going?’
	‘To find her.’
	‘What?’ he hissed, only half hearing the iterator’s continued verbal assaults. ‘I need you to speak of Isstvan V. As a witness, your testimony is crucial.’
	‘I have to find her, Arcadese.’
	The Ultramarine’s face creased with confusion. ‘Why?’ He grimaced. Arcadese’s injuries had not fully healed; they would never fully heal. His bionics gave him motion but at a cost in pain. No human could bear it. For a Legionary such as the Ultramarine it left him debilitated. Even had he awoken from his sus-an membrane coma in time for the muster to Calth, Arcadese would not have gone. He was no longer a front-line trooper. Denial raged in his words and his manner but his eyes couldn’t hide it. Heka’tan saw it as easily as he did his own failings.
	‘We were charged with her protection, brother. We swore an oath, both of us, in case you don’t remember. An oath of moment. I’m assuming that still means something to you.’
	Arcadese straightened suddenly and for a moment Heka’tan thought he might strike him. Then he relaxed, bionics cycling down to a low hum from their agitated squeal.
	‘I’m not sure what anything means, any more,’ he conceded in a low voice, not referring to his honour parchments. ‘I remember,’ he added, louder, ‘but this is our duty too.’ 
	‘I just want to know she is safe.’
	Arcadese sighed, resigned. ‘Do what you must, but when Bastion swears for Horus and we are ejected unceremoniously from its atmosphere, do not lay the blame squarely on my shoulders, brother.’ The Ultramarine’s face and demeanour changed abruptly. ‘What’s wrong with your hand?’
	It was shaking, so slightly Heka’tan hadn’t realised. 
	‘Nerve tremor,’ he lied, ‘probably from the crash. Soon as I find the artificer, I’ll return.’
	There was no time for a reply. All eyes were on Arcadese again as he took his turn to try and sway the clave. ‘I need battle, not debate,’ he muttered, totally unaware that he was about to get his wish. 
	II
	A blighted plain of ruined cities and virus-scoured landmarks scrolled before the clave-nobles in grainy panoramic. The recording had sound as well as image but was eerily quiet. 
	‘What do you hear?’ Arcadese asked, leaving a long pause to emphasise his point. ‘It is the sound of death. It is Isstvan III, where Horus Lupercal committed genocide and set in motion a galactic war. An entire planet destroyed by viral weaponry. Fratricide amongst the Legiones Astartes themselves, conducted on a massive scale. Only by the efforts of Captain Garro of the Death Guard, escaping on the frigate Eisenstein, is anyone alive to tell of this atrocity. No fair warning, no order to stand down. Just death.’
	Arcadese signalled for the image to be shut off. He pressed his palms together. ‘These are the deeds of a dictator, one who has turned from the Emperor’s light and embraced darkness.’ 
	The Ultramarine scowled. ‘Isstvan III was a ploy to draw out those still loyal to the Emperor and cull them in one blow. Ally with Horus, and you join forces with a madman.’
	Vorkellen spoke up quickly. ‘Isstvan III was a planet in open revolt. Its lord commander was a psyker-mutant called Vardus Praal that had declared against the Imperium. It was on the orders of the Council of Terra itself that the Sons of Horus and their brother Legions were sent there.’
	‘What is your point, iterator?’ asked the head high-noble.
	‘That Horus was ordered to the Isstvan system by the agents of the Emperor’s will and yet it is claimed this was somehow part of the Warmaster’s plan to rid himself of internecine traitors? He was sent there,’ his gaze went to the Ultramarine, ‘Sent. There. By Terra.’
	Arcadese clenched his fists. ‘He slew billions, bombarded the surface and then unleashed his mad dog upon those warriors still loyal to the Emperor.’
	‘A world in the thrall of a dangerous defector from Imperial Law, a psyker-mutant no less – a creature with the ability to affect the minds of men,’ the iterator continued. ‘We were not at Isstvan III – your fighting days were done at Ullanor, were they not?’
	Arcadese didn’t answer. His teeth were clenched and he glowered.
	Vorkellen went on. ‘I have testimony that a vein of disaffection ran through the Imperial forces, and that the Emperor sought to rein in the Warmaster’s pre-eminence. Certainly, his cult of personality was growing ever since the Emperor abandoned the Great Crusade. Can gods be jealous?’
	‘This is idiotic,’ Arcadese pleaded to the clave. ‘These are facile notions designed to muddy the truth – that Horus committed genocide and staged a pre-emptive strike against warriors in his Legion and the Legions of his traitorous brothers that were still loyal to the Emperor.’
	‘Horus only acted when forced,’ Vorkellen replied, ‘when he realised factions within his own ranks, warriors sworn loyal to him, were gathering against him, he did the only thing he could. He stopped them.’
	‘And in so doing, slew thousands,’ replied Arcadese, ‘scribes, poets, imagists and iterators from the Remembrancer Order into the bargain. He is a monster.’
	III
	The word was hard to use. 
	Monster. 
	Horus was still a father figure of sorts to this Legionary, Vorkellen saw it described in the anguish on the Ultramarine’s face. 
	He is still struggling to understand, he thought. The Emperor was a fool to send warriors such as these. They are broken soldiers, gratefully forgotten by their Legions. He has doubts, and if he has doubts… well…
	‘It was your beloved master who put these men and women in danger. Sent to document the Great Crusade, to cement forever in living memory the deeds of the Emperor and his primarchs. Their deaths were a tragedy, but war, a war brought about by an absent father who failed to attend to his sons, has many casualties. It hardly makes the Warmaster a monster.’
	As the Ultramarine’s face screwed up into a snarl, Vorkellen allowed himself a tiny smile. Go on then, now is the time – seal my victory.
	‘What has been promised you, eh, Vorkellen is it?’ The Ultramarine couldn’t keep the venomous sneer from his lips. 
	‘I am merely a humble servant, here to see that my master is fairly represented.’
	‘Do you honour a pact with some fell power, a concubine perhaps?’
	Vorkellen’s eyes were icy. ‘You would like to crush me, wouldn’t you?’
	Arcadese nodded slowly, drawing an objection from the clave that Vorkellen waved down. 
	‘The Emperor sends warriors when he really needs ambassadors, those who won’t embarrass themselves in unfamiliar surroundings where a bolter and blade is of no import.’
	‘I don’t need my weapons to break you!’ Arcadese was raging again and stepped towards the iterator.
	And thereit is. Vorkellen smiled, just for the Ultramarine. You cannot fight nature.
	A squad of marshals wielding flash-sabres moved in to intercept him.
	IV
	Arcadese knew he could crush them without his weapons, do it so quick and clean he’d be at Vorkellen’s throat before the emergency command be given and the chamber flooded with armed men. 
	Instead, he put up his hand. 
	The guards backed off. 
	Arcadese sagged, feeling the tendrils of defeat tighten around his heart.
	Heka’tan,where are you?
	Bodies
	I
	The levels below the auditorium were vast and labyrinthine. It would take an army of men weeks to find an individual in its depths if it didn’t want to be found. Heka’tan was but one man, and he had a few hours at most. 
	At least the shaking had ceased. When he’d forced the guard to let him go below and the dark had enveloped him, he’d leant against the wall and closed his eyes. Images of the dropsite massacre had sprung unbidden into his mind. He remembered his last sight of Vulkan, the primarch engulfed in bright magnesium light. 
	Dead? No one knew. It was a mystery that haunted the Legion. Ferrus Manus was dead. A terrible fate for any Legion to lose their father, but at least the Iron Hands had closure, at least they knew. In many ways, for the Salamanders, it was worse. And what now for them? A bit part in a galactic war where the fate of humanity and Terra was the prize and cost. 
	Heka’tan put the thoughts from his mind and started to search. 
	He found Persephia’s body after thirty minutes.
	She lay discarded like refuse in one of the archive chambers, her innards pooled in her lap like glossy red ribbons. The artificer’s face was locked in a horror-grimace, flecked by her own dried blood.
	She hadn’t died here. There were drag marks on the floor, hastily concealed. Heka’tan held out his hand and detected a tiny prickling sensation on his fingertips. Heat. It was bleeding upwards from below.
	Heka’tan looked back to the corpse. The wound in Persephia’s chest was familiar to him. He knew what had caused it. She had been eviscerated by a chainsword. It was a Legion weapon. Arcadese was right, Horus had sent warriors. 
	The Salamander followed the source of the heat.
	II
	The shadow shifted on the balcony. It caressed the rifle in its hands now. The red-eyed one was missing, and it didn’t like that. Made it feel vulnerable, potentially exposed when there was a Legionary unaccounted for. The work below was supposed to be finished, now the second phase began. There were four marshals below, watching the stairways into the lower chambers. Another four stood nearby in the dark. No guns here. No weapons of any sort. How foolish they were. How arrogant. 
	The high-marshal was alone and pensive as the proceedings went on. He was blind, just like the clave-nobles and the other onlookers were blind. They would see. Everyone would see. But then it would be too late. Then there was the iterator and his cronies, and the other warrior; the broken one, the half-Space Marine. Little did he realise it wasn’t just his body that had been ripped by the greenskin. 
	It was nearly time. The shadow shifted on the balcony, bringing the rifle sight up to its eye. The target sat snugly in its crosshairs. A second and it would be over. Just one second, the time it takes to squeeze a trigger. Soon.
	III
	They were losing. He was losing. Not a bolt fired, nor a blade drawn and still Arcadese knew the battle was being lost, metre by agonising metre. For a warrior, it was a strange sensation, not how he had pictured his service to his Legion.
	The human iterator, despite his outward frailties, had a formidable intelligence; in a fit of pique, Arcadese thought he’d been mind-augmented or hypno-conditioned. 
	Dagonet was a disaster. Vorkellen painted Horus as victim and the Imperium as dishonourable murderers. A fortunate twist of fate had allowed the Warmaster to escape a heinous assassination attempt; whilst leaving one of his captains and a vaunted Legionary, Luc Sedirae, slain in cold blood. The massacre that followed was retaliatory, an effort to find and execute the perpetrators. Collateral damage was inevitable. The Emperor’s hand had caused this, or the agents acting in his stead.
	Prospero was no better. Wolves unleashed on a cultured world and a son that desired only to please his father. The subsequent razing of the Planet of the Sorcerers was made to show the Emperor’s inability to forgive or grant mercy. Was Magnus really such a threat? Leman Russ and his Legion made sure that question could never be answered.
	None of it added strength to Arcadese’s cause, and he felt the allegiance of Bastion slipping from his grasp. He had only one argument left, but the one to give it was nowhere to be found.
	IV
	Unarmed and wearing robes, Heka’tan knew he was at a distinct disadvantage against another warrior of the Legiones Astartes. 
	He could have gone back, raised the alarm, but then Persephia’s murderer might have already escaped and they would never know what was really going on here. He told himself this was the reason but the truth of it was his rage for Isstvan V had been impotent for too long; he needed to vent it. 
	It didn’t take long to follow the murderer’s trail. It led Heka’tan to a steel gantry looking down on Bastion’s nuclear core. He recognised the figure still toiling in its depths. Memories of fighting a desperate last stand in the Urgall Depression came back to him.
	‘Iron Warrior!’
	The grey-metal Legionary turned, his helmet lenses glinting coldly in the reflected nuclear light. 
	He scoffed, a harsh and tinny sound that emanated from his vox-grille. ‘Aren’t your kind all dead?’
	Heka’tan roared and threw himself over the gantry. He collided with the Iron Warrior – hitting the ceramite like it was a fortress wall. He didn’t have time to evade the plunging Salamander. He’d only half-drawn his chainblade when Heka’tan knocked it buzzing from his grasp and onto the lower gantry floor. 
	Instantly the two Legionaries became locked in a fearsome embrace. But with his power armoured battle-plate, the Iron Warrior was stronger.
	‘What gave me away?’ he growled, forcing Heka’tan to his knees, the fingers of both combatants laced together in a wrestler’s grappling hold. ‘It was the human, wasn’t it? So like your benevolent, dead Vulkan to come looking for an innocent.’
	A surge of anger leant Heka’tan strength. He pushed with his legs, using sheer brute force to draw level and stand face-to-face with the Iron Warrior.
	‘Don’t sully his name with your tongue, betrayer,’ he spat. 
	The Iron Warrior seized Heka’tan’s fingers in his gauntleted grip, causing the Salamander to cry out as he flung him across the gantry and down to the level below. 
	Pain blurred Heka’tan’s vision but he saw his enemy coming to finish him well enough. He reached over and his shattered fingers found what they sought.
	The Iron Warrior raised a massive fist, intent on beating his former brother to death, when he found the buzzing teeth of his own chainsword lodged in his gut. He had charged right onto it. 
	Heka’tan held onto the hilt as long as he could before struggling to his feet and barging into the flailing, bleeding Iron Warrior. The two of them broke the gantry rail and plunged over the edge. 
	Heat radiation coming off the nuclear core warmed Heka’tan’s skin. He was hanging one-handed off the twisted railing several levels down, the Iron Warrior doing the same a few metres away. His armour was blistering, the black and yellow painted chevrons flaking away. 
	‘This changes nothing, Salamander. Vulkan is dead,’ he laughed. ‘You’re all dead.’ He reached for his bolt pistol sat snug in his side holster and made the railing squeal. He was too heavy for it to hold. The metal broke away and the Iron Warrior fell. Heka’tan watched him carom off another gantry, then a piece of piping, before bouncing off into the nuclear core itself. There was a brief flash of azure fire and the Legionary disappeared, burned to ash. 
	With some effort, Heka’tan dragged his body back up onto the gantry. He tried not to think about the Iron Warrior’s last words, what he’d said about his father. It wasn’t true. He was merely being goaded. 
	The enemy had dropped something when they’d fought. It was a data-bundle of some kind, taken from one of the subterranean terminals. It was smashed up but the last piece of data was still on the recorder: war machine schematics, vast and terrible engines the likes of which Heka’tan had never seen. They’d been kept here in secret and now the saboteur was erasing their existence. Coming to Bastion had never been about winning allegiance. Limping, he went to the terminal screen. It displayed all the other nuclear hubs around the planet, but he didn’t know why.
	With time running out and still weaponless, Heka’tan hurried back to the auditorium. 
	V
	Arcadese had done his best, but the time for talking was over. 
	The clave had heard the petitions of both parties, had deliberated and were about to give their answer.
	On the balcony above, the high-noble came forwards into the light. His expression was unreadable.
	‘We of Bastion are a proud people. None the less we joined the nascent Imperium on the promise of unity and prosperity. I would prefer independence but since that would see us consigned to atoms by Legion starships, I have little choice.’ The high-noble seemed reluctant to continue. ‘We honour our original oaths, Bastion will pledge for Hor–’ 
	‘Arcadese!’ The warning brought all eyes to the Salamander and came three seconds before the rifle shot. The Ultramarine had enough time to discern the grainy red light from the laser sight, to catch the opening bloom of the muzzle flash as it flared wide and put his body between the assassin and its target. 
	Iterator Vorkellen screamed as the Legionary bore down on him, believing at first that the Ultramarine had finally cracked. The marshals were too slow to intervene, just as surprised as the iterator.
	The bullet forced a grimace as it grazed Arcadese’s shoulder. He was trying to twist mid-air so he didn’t crush Vorkellen’s bones to paste when they landed. The second shot, taking a marshal in the neck and killing him instantly, gave the others pause. Only when the third went down, right eye ventilated, did they all look to the other balcony. 
	VI
	He was crouched, nose of the rifle just peeking over the balcony edge, when Heka’tan found him. 
	The Salamander made the assessment of his enemy quickly, as he was reaching the top of the stairs and advancing. 
	Human, wearing nondescript clothes. He recalled the landman from earlier and knew this was the same individual. He also saw a sanctum-marshal’s garb in a bundle nearby to the shooter’s position. The rifle was custom – it looked almost ceramic. That’s how he’d avoided detection. Nine marshals entered; now, only eight took up their positions. It was so dark, slipping away would’ve been easy.
	‘You overextend yourself,’ said the Salamander, slowing to a walk, filling the balcony walkway with his onyx-black bulk. ‘I saw your rifle tip from below. I saw it earlier too, I think. You were the one that shot down our ship.’
	The landman stood and nodded. Evidently, the rifle was spent. He’d discarded it and drew a long blade from his side instead – literally from his side. Heka’tan’s eyes widened when he saw it snuck out of the assassin’s flesh. 
	‘You should’ve hit the fuel tanks and not the wing,’ the Salamander went on, creeping closer, allowing Arcadese time to catch up and support him. It looked like a man before him, but the Space Marine’s instincts told him otherwise. This was something else. ‘Your aim was off if you were planning on killing everyone on board.’
	‘Was it?’ The assassin flashed a smile and his eyes changed colour, even the hue of his skin seemed to shift. 
	Heka’tan lunged just as the blade was flung at him. He dodged, reacting to the sudden move, but cried out as it shaved his skin. He missed the assassin by a hand span, grasping air as he leapt off the balcony and to the floor below. 
	VII
	Arcadese swung at the assassin’s leaping form with a flash-sabre from one of the dead guards but missed. He about-faced but couldn’t stop two more marshals dying to the assassin’s finger-blades. A third fell to what looked like a barbed tongue, lashing from the man’s mouth. 
	The Ultramarine gave chase, but his bionics slowed him down. The assassin had reached the shadows and led into the corridors beyond. Even on the upper level, the auditorium space was a honeycomb of passageways and conduits. 
	Heka’tan was right behind him. 
	‘You’re bleeding,’ he remarked, noting the bullet graze along the Ultramarine’s shoulder.
	‘So are you.’
	Heka’tan dabbed at his flank with a finger and felt the blade wound. ‘Then we owe him two cuts, one each,’ he promised and followed the assassin into the darkness. Behind them, the remaining marshals were trying not to panic. They’d also foregone pursuit to secure the clave-nobles. The high-marshal was vociferous above the clamour, bellowing frantic orders. 
	Vorkellen was screeching at his lackeys, in obvious pain. It drew a smile to Arcadese’s lips, smothered by the shadows that engulfed him.
	With the darkness the sound died away and the Legionaries slowed. 
	Heka’tan hissed, ‘You were right, brother.’ 
	‘What do you mean?’ asked Arcadese, staying as low as he could and watching the deeper shadows.
	‘I found another of Horus’s emissaries below, an Iron Warrior.’ 
	That piqued the Ultramarine’s interest. 
	‘I killed him but he was doing something below, something that the garrison here has been working on. He was monitoring the nuclear hubs too. I don’t know why. Answers may come from our assassin. Either way, word must reach the rest of the Imperium.’ 
	‘And we are sealed in,’ Arcadese remarked ruefully. 
	Heka’tan’s eyes blazed belligerently.
	‘But so is he.’
	Hunters
	I
	The attack was swift. The red-eyed one was easy to spot; the broken one it could hear fifty metres away. They were not stealthy targets, either of them. 
	A shallow cry of pain felt satisfying as it plunged a blade into red-eyes’s shoulder. A heavy punch into the broken one’s ribs made an audible crack. So much for the dense bone-plate – the surgeries must have weakened it. 
	It dodged a reply, then a second. Rolling up to its full height, it disengaged the holofield trapping it in the landman’s form.
	II
	Arcadese swung wildly, but met only air with his borrowed flash-sabre. Next to him, Heka’tan grunted and he assumed the Salamander had failed to make contact too. 
	The assassin was fast – faster than them. Faster than him. Not for the first time, he cursed at his bionics. 
	He was rolling and Arcadese was turning, Heka’tan too. What met them both as the darkness parted before the flash-sabre’s magnesium flare was not what the Ultramarine expected. 
	He was not a man at all, at least not one that adhered to the normal conventions of size. He was massive, taller than either Arcadese or Heka’tan, and he was fierce. Tattoos around the attacker’s neck described a long chain of words, a name, or several fractions of a name, recounted on his body, disappearing beneath a loose-fitting bodyglove of red leather. The armour looked gladiatorial. There was something Terran about it. When Arcadese saw the marking on the warrior’s fist as he swung the spatha around in a lazy rotational arc, he knew. 
	‘Custodian.’
	III
	When the blade flashed in, the Ultramarine parried quickly. He was already backing away. Heka’tan was trying to circle. He’d made the connection too, realising the landman was merely a projection, courtesy of a holofield. 
	The Salamander tried to shoulder barge the warrior, distract him and bring him into his battle-brother’s arc, but he weaved aside, slamming his elbow down on Heka’tan’s spine. Then he went down, snapping a blade-kick into Arcadese’s gut that sent him sprawling.
	When both Legiones Astartes had got up, the assassin was gone, absorbed into the darkness.
	Arcadese retrieved his flash-sabre and went to give chase. Heka’tan seized his shoulder, stopping him.
	‘No, that’s what he wants. Wait. Think.’
	The Ultramarine nodded. ‘You’re right.’ His mind was reeling – a Custodian, here on Bastion, trying to kill Horus’s iterator. What was this – Plan B? ‘Should we even fight him? Could we? I’m surprised we lived as long as we did.’
	Heka’tan only glowered at the dark. ‘We need to dig in and wait it out.’
	‘He will pick us off, one by one. We cannot wait.’ He glanced back askance at the Salamander. ‘We could always just give him what he wants.’
	‘No, something isn’t right.’
	‘Then what do you suggest? The Custodians are loyal only to the Emperor. They are his lions, Salamander. They do not question, they merely do. If we are between him and his prey–’
	‘That’s not a Custodian,’ Heka’tan interjected. ‘It is similar, but its movements are copied, its form a facsimile, a simulacrum.’ 
	Arcadese hissed, retreating into the light with his brother. ‘How can you be sure?’
	Their eyes met. Heka’tan’s flared with an angry glow.
	‘Because if it was real, we’d already be dead.’
	IV
	There was panic in the auditorium. The shot and subsequent commotion had lit a spark of fear in the assembly that was growing from a flame into a conflagration. Streams of politicians and senators were rushing from their seats to pound on the doors to the auditorium. Some screamed, others sobbed, a few merely stayed seated and stared. 
	By now the clave-nobles had been evacuated from the balcony and were on the main auditorium floor, surrounded by their bodyguards with the rest of the trapped civilians.
	Other soldiers were scanning the upper echelons and alcoves for further assassins. They would find none.
	Amongst the visitors, Vorkellen was profoundly unhappy and addressed the already stressed high-marshal who was trying to restore order. ‘What are you doing to get us out of here?’ 
	Insk was nearby, muttering soothing words to his master and requesting relaxants from another aide. Vorkellen waved them away with bitter tirades.
	V
	Arcadese was in unsympathetic mood and replied in the high-marshal’s stead. ‘We are trapped, you idiot. There’s nothing he can do.’
	The iterator looked about to respond but bit back his tongue when the Ultramarine glowered. Arcadese let him be, and approached Heka’tan. Frantic as they were, the people kept away from the two Legionaries. 
	The Salamander leant in close, talking softly so that no one else could hear him.
	‘Whatever that thing is, it will come for us.’ 
	‘I know.’ Arcadese had his eye on the humans. They’d started to huddle around the sealed door and were spilling out into the centre of the chamber. ‘Their fear disgusts me. I thought this was meant to be a war-like world.’
	‘They are not soldiers, not all of them, and they’ve never been trapped in a room with something like this before,’ Heka’tan paused, feeling sympathy for the panicked mob. ‘We have to hunt it down.’
	Arcadese nodded. 
	Heka’tan went on, ‘You were right. We cannot wait. We waited at Isstvan.’ His eyes went off to a dark place, one from memory. ‘We waited and died.’ His hand was shaking again. He clenched it with his other hand to steady it.
	Arcadese lowered his voice. ‘I’m sorry that you’re still affected by it, brother. I cannot imagine the pain.’
	‘The legacy isn’t mine to bear. It’s for those who follow, for whatever happens next.’
	Regarding the dead marshals, left where they’d fallen, Arcadese changed subject. ‘This matter was always going to be decided by blood. These entire proceedings were a farce. Unless we find that assassin, the Imperium will be accused of treachery. No one will negotiate with us.’
	Heka’tan was shaking his head slowly. ‘Perhaps? But I feel there is something else going on here, something from back when the Iron Warriors had a garrison on this world.’
	‘Then we must expose the truth, whatever that might be. Our best chance is tracking the iterator’s would-be killer.’
	‘I cannot help think it merely shrouds an even greater atrocity.’ Heka’tan gestured to the crowd. Some of the fervour had died down now. There was moaning and grim-faced acceptance. ‘And there are the humans to consider.’
	Arcadese looked nonplussed. ‘What about them?’
	‘If we’re outmanoeuvred the assassin would make a red mess of them.’
	‘They’ll have to look to their own defence.’
	‘One of us should stay.’
	‘We need both of us to kill this thing. Since when did the sons of Vulkan not present a united front?’
	‘We’re pragmatists too, brother, and know when to adapt,’ said Heka’tan. ‘We cannot wait around to be murdered where we stand. So, I’ll go.’
	‘You?’ Arcadese’s displeasure was obvious. ‘If you want to protect the humans so badly then stay behind and do just that.’ A few of the civilians had turned as the volume of the conversation rose.
	‘I wish I could, but only one of us can hunt. You are not able.’
	The Ultramarine’s tone darkened. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
	‘Look at you,’ offered Heka’tan with traditional Salamander bluntness. He hadn’t meant to be insulting, he just didn’t appreciate his words and manner could be construed that way.
	‘I am a warrior still,’ Arcadese asserted, ‘as strong and capable as any uncouth barbarian from a tribal culture.’
	‘Prove it then.’
	‘What?’
	‘Attack me, see if you can humble–’
	Arcadese launched himself at Heka’tan, flash-sabre blazing. He was slow though, just a second or two, but enough of a lag for the Salamander to avoid the blow and head-butt the Ultramarine fiercely across the bridge of his patrician nose. 
	Blood gushed, streaking Arcadese’s lips, before Heka’tan used the Ultramarine’s bulk against him and sent him sprawling across the auditorium floor. A few of the nobles had to scurry out of the way. There were fearful gasps as their protectors turned on one another.
	Arcadese was up as swiftly as his bionics allowed but found his flash-sabre taken and levelled at his neck. 
	‘I will hunt,’ Heka’tan told him. ‘You stay.’
	Breathing hard, the Ultramarine nodded slowly. ‘I won’t forget this, son of Vulkan.’
	‘I know you won’t.’ Heka’tan jogged off into the darkness, flash-sabre in hand.
	VI
	The Salamander returned less than an hour later.
	Arcadese had his back to him. The Ultramarine’s demeanour hadn’t improved. 
	‘Have you given up already? I thought Salamanders were supposed to be tenacious.’
	‘I found a spoor and followed it into the deeper conduits,’ Heka’tan replied. Arcadese noticed he was holding the flash-sabre in the opposite hand. ‘It seems the assassin had an escape route planned from the beginning.’
	‘So, he’s gone?’ 
	Heka’tan nodded, ‘Through a way we can’t follow. It’s too narrow, too steep, and goes right to the bowels of the complex, to the geothermal sub-levels.’
	‘We wait then,’ said Arcadese, turning his back on Heka’tan, ‘for the gates to open and our failure to be known to our Legions. Horus has won this world, brother.’
	‘It is worse than that,’ said Heka’tan, in a voice that sounded only partially like his own.
	Rather than being shocked, Arcadese dropped his shoulder for the attack he knew was coming. He turned, bringing up another flash-sabre, parrying Heka’tan’s bone-blade that had rapidly morphed from his fingertips. 
	‘How did you know?’ asked the assassin.
	Their blades were locked, spitting sparks and bone chips.
	‘The smell,’ Arcadese told his attacker. He smiled as a thunderous bulk rammed into the assassin, crumpling his flank.
	‘I reek of ash and heat,’ said the real Heka’tan, having exploded from the shadows where he’d been lurking since his initial departure. ‘Your wound obviously wasn’t quite deep enough.’ 
	They wrestled, Salamander and assassin, the latter transforming even as they moved. 
	A metamorphic catalogue of identities blended and re-blended across the alien’s face, first the landman, then the subtle facial shift to the marshal, finally the Custodian upon which it settled. 
	‘You are no lion,’ snarled Heka’tan, snapping a vertebra in the creature’s spine. 
	Around them, the crowd shrieked and shouted in terror. The throng pressing up against the door became a crush. 
	The assassin mewled in pain, a tonal, bird-like resonance that set the Salamander’s teeth on edge. 
	‘Clever,’ it hissed through clenched teeth, bringing its knees up sharply into Heka’tan’s sternum and vaulting him off its body. 
	The Salamander landed in a wide sprawl, a few metres away. 
	‘A lie to snare a liar.’ Arcadese came crashing in, two-handed, with the flash-sabre. A ball of light blazed and faded at once as the weapon connected with stone not flesh. 
	The assassin bounded backwards, weaving to avoid the Salamander’s heavy cross as it came within range.
	The bone-blade became a Custodian’s training spatha in its right hand and it slashed at Arcadese. 
	Faux-steel screeched against true-steel as the Ultramarine took the blow on his bionic arm. It was only his forearm that was augmetic but it provided an effective foil. He stomped, aiming for the assassin’s foot to cripple it. Rockcrete splintered beneath him, the ground webbing outwards in tiny fault lines. 
	‘Yield, you are undone,’ snapped Arcadese.
	Heka’tan loomed in snatches of the Ultramarine’s vision, just behind the assassin. 
	He flung his arms out and snapped them together like mechanical foundry tongs, seizing the assassin in an onyx-black grip.
	‘You are the ones who are undone,’ the creature cackled, spitting a gobbet of intestinal acid that seared Heka’tan’s cheek. The Salamander didn’t even flinch, he merely squeezed.
	Arcadese caved in the creature’s face with a bionic fist, the bone-blade ripped from the assassin’s grasp but still lodged in his forearm. 
	It wheezed like a perforated lung as Heka’tan slowly crushed it. The integrity of the creature’s mimicry was breaking down with the onset of its death. Personas strange and familiar raced across its form and countenance like the changing of the seasons. 
	‘What was your purpose here?’ Heka’tan growled, bearing the lacrymole down, for it could be no other xenos abomination. ‘What greater evil are you masking?’
	Vampiric shapeshifters, the Emperor and his Legions had taken great pains to ensure the annihilation of the lacrymole and yet, like the Terran atom-roach, they refused to become extinct. 
	Even its true form was nebulous, a conglomeration of wrongly shaped limbs and distended flesh-parts. Its eyes were discernable, however – pitiless black pinpricks of endless hate. 
	It died laughing, a hot, wet sound more choke than mirth. 
	‘What I cannot fathom,’ uttered Heka’tan when it was done and the broken sack of muscle and bone shards slid from his forge-smith’s grasp, ‘is how it could emulate a Custodian?’
	Arcadese mashed the lacrymole’s quivering cranium with his boot. The bionic force he applied was enough to pulp it. The lacrymole needed to taste their prey, absorb them, before they could copy them biologically. To emulate one almost perfectly, it meant this alien had somehow bested and consumed the biological matter of one of the Emperor’s lions. Such a thing didn’t seem possible.
	The Ultramarine shook his head. ‘What did it mean, “You are the ones that are undone”?’
	Planetkill
	I
	The answer came with the thunderous boom that shook the flagstones of the auditorium floor. The explosion emanated from far beneath them, in the lowest levels at Cullis’s nuclear hub.
	Subdued by the death of the assassin and the relief that brought, the trapped Bastionites started to panic anew and hammered at the door again. 
	Another explosion rocked the chamber and a crack formed underfoot. A clutch of senators disappeared into the darkness and in the plume of fire that spewed up after them.
	One of the clave-nobles had broken free of his bodyguards and was tugging at Arcadese’s robes. ‘Save us... please.’
	The Ultramarine looked down on the man with disdain.
	Heka’tan interrupted his response. ‘We have been doubly deceived, brother.’
	A twitch below Arcadese’s right eye betrayed the pain of the injuries the Ultramarine had sustained in the fight with the lacrymole assassin. He was angry at being duped. ‘A saboteur?’ 
	‘Willing to destroy an entire planet to keep its secrets,’ said Heka’tan. Another tremor shook the chamber. A column split from its dais and crushed more of the civilians. There would be no hope of restoring order now. 
	‘Then these minor explosions are merely a preamble to something much bigger.’ The clave-noble was still scrabbling at the Ultramarine’s garb. He pushed the human away. ‘Begone! By holding court with Horus you have doomed yourself and your world.’
	‘Perhaps not...’ Heka’tan was looking past the frightened crowd to the door. The broken masonry had fallen against it. The column had been heavy enough to put a wide crack in the door’s surface. 
	Some of the trapped civilians were even now pulling at it. 
	‘Stand aside,’ Arcadese bellowed, ‘in the name of the Legiones Astartes!’
	The frightened throng parted for the two warriors who reached the door and each taking a side of the fissure, which was deep enough to get their fingers in, pulled. The stone door came away in chunks now that its structural integrity had been compromised. The crack widened.
	Bullied to the front by his entourage, Vorkellen was right behind the Legionaries. 
	‘Get us out,’ he pleaded in a small voice, clinging to Heka’tan’s arm. ‘I too have been deceived.’ 
	The Salamander looked down at him like he was the intestinal remains of an enemy he’d just gutted. ‘Where is your ship?’ he demanded, before the majority of the auditorium floor collapsed into a fiery chasm. Most of the senators went with it. Only those clustered next to the exit were spared death by fire.
	‘Close, at the end of the gangway just outside,’ said the iterator. All of his suave self-assurance was evaporating before the prospect of his imminent demise.
	Debris was falling from the ceiling, killing Bastionites by the score.
	The gap in the door was wide enough for the Legionaries to squeeze out, which meant it was also large enough for the humans too. There were precious few left, just the clave-nobles and a handful of senators and marshals, and the iterator with his cronies of course. 
	Arcadese was first out and began waving the others on. Heka’tan was last through just as an almighty conflagration swept across the sundered auditorium. Smudged silhouettes in the smoke cloud screamed for rescue but the Salamander closed his senses to them. 
	‘They’re good as dead,’ he said as he met the hard gaze of the Ultramarine. It wasn’t an easy choice to make.
	II
	Then they were running, even as Cullis was collapsing around them. Portions of the city were giving way under the chain of incendiaries planted by the Iron Warrior. Out in the slums, great cracks were opening up in the ground, pulling in vast tracts of sump-ash. Distant landmen drove their hauler-trucks in crazy arcs to avoid the growing fissures. On the horizon behind them, the super-rigs and megaliths of other Bastion cities burned. 
	Out on the landing platform the air hazed. Ash and flesh-smoke baked on the hot breeze. Girders and gantries groaned in protest as they buckled and fell in the expanding conflagration below.
	They were fleeing across the exit strip that led to the deck where Vorkellen’s ship was still anchored when a fuel hopper burst and sent a plume of fire and force into the air. 
	Several of the civilians were thrown off the narrow companionway and plummeted screaming. 
	Leading, Arcadese, turned to see another group crushed by a collapsed comms tower. They died without uttering a sound.
	Heka’tan was missing. Just a few more metres to the ship and he’d lost the Salamander. Vorkellen, too, was nowhere to be seen. Smoke and fire dirtied the view. 
	The Ultramarine waved the few survivors on. ‘Into the ship.’ He seized one of the iterator’s cronies by the arm as he hurried past. The scrivener had a cut to his forehead and looked dazed. ‘Wait for us,’ Arcadese told him. After the scrivener had nodded feebly, the Ultramarine let him go and went back into the smoke cloud.
	‘Heka’tan!’ The pall was thick, getting thicker. Arcadese wished he still had his battle-helm; the task of finding his battle-brother was made more difficult without it. 
	Below the belt of charcoal-grey, the Ultramarine saw four grasping fingers. They were black, like onyx. 
	Arcadese cried, ‘Hold on!’ and rushed to the ragged lip of the companionway. He thrust his hand down but Heka’tan slipped and fell another half-metre. Gripping a twisted metal rebar, he looked up at the Ultramarine. There was blood on his face and one of his eyes was swollen shut. 
	‘Save him.’ He had to shout above the roar of the flames boiling below.
	Arcadese’s gaze flitted to Vorkellen, who was also stranded and clinging on desperately. The iterator peered down intermittently, white-faced and clammy.
	The Ultramarine shook his head and reached harder, farther. ‘You first. Reach up.’
	‘Protect the weak,’ Heka’tan told him. ‘No matter who that is.’
	In no mood to debate, Arcadese growled, ‘Reach up. Now!’
	Still holding on with one hand, Heka’tan swung up the other and stretched. Their fingertips could almost touch.
	‘A little more…’ 
	‘It’s too far. Get out while you can.’
	Arcadese shook his head. ‘We are so close…’ he said. His face was wrenched with effort. He leaned and found purchase on Heka’tan’s fingers… 
	…just as the Salamander’s hand began to tremble. As the nerve tremor took hold it shook Arcadese’s grip free. Heka’tan was flailing now. The explosions, the smoke and fire – he was reliving Isstvan all over again.
	‘Steady yourself… I can’t…’ Arcadese snatched at Heka’tan’s shaking hand, but was unable to get a grip. ‘Steady yourself, brother.’
	Their eyes met, the reflection of the destruction trapped in the Salamander’s locked there forever. 
	‘Let me go,’ he said, lowering his quivering hand. His voice was calm, his mind decided. 
	Arcadese raged, gesturing frantically. ‘I can lift you. What are you doing?’
	‘Going to join my brothers.’ He let go.
	Bellowing denial and utterly powerless, the Ultramarine watched Heka’tan plummet for a few metres until he was swallowed by the explosions. Arcadese thumped the companionway, splitting the rockcrete. Nearby, Vorkellen was screaming.
	‘Don’t let me die, please don’t let me die…’
	Bereft of all pity, of any feeling, his organic flesh as inured as his augmetic implants, Arcadese grabbed the iterator’s wrist and dragged him up. 
	Just a few seconds later, a column of fire erupted skywards from where Vorkellen had been swinging. The human staggered to his feet. He was weeping uncontrollably. Arcadese picked him up and threw him over his shoulder. 
	Then he ran as the world of Bastion submitted to its death throes behind him.
	III
	From the shuttle hold, Arcadese looked down upon the ruination of a world. Cooking off in the wake of the incendiaries, Bastion’s thermo-nuclear stockpiles were tearing the planet apart. 
	Long chains of fire stitched the world’s surface like its seams had been unpicked and were slowly being burned apart. Continents cracked and mountains sank. The oceans boiled to gas and the cities were consumed. Billions would look to the artificial nuclear sunrise, their retinas seared away in seconds, the skin of their bodies flaking like parchment only to become as ash on the wind. And even that was ephemeral, torn apart and scattered to oblivion by the blast wave that followed.
	A small armada of ships had managed to achieve orbit; others had been swallowed up in the chaos, failing to achieve loft and put enough distance between themselves and the rapidly unfolding cataclysm. 
	They were headed for the Imperial starship at anchor on the edge of the system. Arcadese had already voxed a warning to its captain but no attack had come from any vessel affiliated with the Warmaster. The work here was done. The Iron Warrior had achieved his mission. Whatever the purpose of the schematics Heka’tan had described, it would not be discovered until it was too late. The message was sent. Horus wanted the galaxy to know, he had used Bastion as an example. 
	Ally with the Imperium and die.
	Neutral planets would go down on bended knee for the Warmaster now, the threat of reprisals too real and absolute for them to ignore. 
	Heka’tan had believed in the possibility of a peaceful solution. Despite everything, he dared to hope that the Traitors would adhere to the rules of engagement. 
	Now, the Salamander was dead, slain like so many of his Legion.
	Arcadese muttered an oath for the Nocturnean beneath his breath. ‘You will not be forgotten, brother,’ he promised. ‘You shall have vengeance.’
	The one responsible would be brought to account. Arcadese might have no place on the front line, but he could do that for a fallen brother. He could do that for all the forgotten sons of the Imperium.