*No,' said Lysander. *Bring us in to the Endeavour of Will.'

Daemon virus, the last message had said. In the arcane code of the astropath, it had flickered across from one star fort to the other at the speed of thought. Witchcraft. Moral threat. We are undone.

The words ran through Techmarine Hestion's mind as he shouldered his way through the bulkhead door, forging a path through a maintenance pa.s.sage not built for a s.p.a.ce Marine in armour. From somewhere deep in the engine and power sections of the Endeavour of Will, warning klaxons were blaring and synthesised voices were issuing dire warnings in a confused babble of sound.

Hestion pulled himself through a hatch into a vast, cold vault. The arched ceiling high above was obscured with freezing mist, and the polished metal of the walls was caked in ice. The vault housed a roughly spherical ma.s.s of archeotech, a biomechanical ma.s.s woven together from dozens of human forms, swathed in cabling and steel casings. The machine-spirit of the Endeavour of Will was housed here, the rhythms of a hundred human bodies regulating its functions and a hundred human brains containing the architecture of its mind. Just as the servitors that maintained the star fort's systems were built around the bodies of deceased crew, so this machine was composed of the bodies of the various tech-adepts and magi who had maintained it over the millennia. Their final honour had been to join the machine-spirit, their own minds mingled with it, their own wisdom added to the vast knowledge fillings its memory banks.

*I can see them,' said the Endeavour of Will, its voice issuing from its hundred mouths. *They are between the seventh and eighth moons. They watch us.'

*The enemy ship is not the biggest threat,' said Hestion. *The last communication from the Bastion Inviolate spoke of witchcraft. Of a tech-virus, born of daemon magic.'

*Then the Bastion is lost,' said the Endeavour of Will. *I felt an emptiness in the realm of information, and I feared my friend was gone. For ten thousand years we have been brothers, forged in the same age, fighting alongside one another in the age that followed. So does time rob us even of that which cannot die.'

*They will a.s.sault us next,' said Hestion. *Shon'tu and his Iron Warriors will not be satisfied with one prize. He will want to take us too.'

*He cannot have us,' said the Endeavour of Will. *You and I, we are forewarned. We will fend off this daemon-scourge. Shon'tu will have to pursue his victory with gun and blade, not witchcraft.'

*This I swear too,' said Hestion.

A s.p.a.ce Marine's lifespan far eclipsed that of an unaugmented human, but even by a s.p.a.ce Marine's standards Hestion was old. His long, mournful face seemed out of place in the red and gold armour of an Imperial Fists Techmarine. He lacked none of the size and presence of a s.p.a.ce Marine, but somehow still looked more like he should be bent over a scholar's desk instead of bringing fire and bloodshed to the Emperor's enemies. Sure enough, bundles of scrolls and books hung from his armour, containing the various tech-rites with which he honoured the spirits of the machines and wargear he maintained for the Chapter.

Hestion took one of the thickest books and his servo-arm unfolded down over his shoulder, the manipulator at its tip unlocking the clasp holding the book's cover closed. Hestion flipped rapidly through the pages and found the ritual he was looking for.

The pages were covered in blocks of zeroes and ones, separated by complicated algebra. Hestion ran his finger down the page, the bionics behind his eyes whirring as they pa.r.s.ed the phrases of machine-code and sent them to the logic circuits in the back of his skull.

*Omnissiah,' read Hestion. *You whose knowledge builds a fortress of understanding in the realm of information. You whose domain is everything forged and wrought. The dark powers look upon your servant with jealousy. Protect him and s.n.a.t.c.h his sacred knowledge back from the jaws of sin.'

The mouths of the many bodies opened. The machine-spirit inside coordinated their vocal cords to create a harmony of machine-code, a white noise of clicking and buzzing that echoed Hestion's words in a language that an unaltered human mind could not comprehend. Fingers twitched as their nervous systems, long unused to movement, stuttered into life.

*Ah, they are here,' growled the Endeavour of Will. Warning lights flickered across the casing, sending red-edged shadows flitting across the columns and arches of the vault. *An edifice of such profane knowledge, crashing through the sea of understanding like a ship crewed by the dead and hung with the trophies of violation. Would that you could see them, Imperial Fist! Even your vaunted hate would be inflamed to a new height!'

Warning icons ghosted over Hestion's vision, projected onto his retina. They told him that an unknown vessel had breached the sensorium range of the Endeavour of Will and was approaching fast, cloaked in all manner of sensor-fooling effects that rendered it a shadow on the void. The Imperial Fists garrison and the human crew, already on the highest of alerts after the death rattle of the Bastion Inviolate, were powering up the star fort's weapons.

*But it was not guns or torpedoes that took down my brother star fort,' continued the machine-spirit. *That is something he could have fought on his own terms! Fire with fire! No, it was the very soul of deceit that brought him low. But I will not follow him into the depths of ignorance! I will not be lied to! By the holy truth shall I be shielded!'

Hestion's servo-arm reconfigured and seared a complicated pentagrammic symbol on the floor of the vault with a cutting laser. The steel of the floor seethed and bubbled around it, and not just with heat.

The shadows were darkening. The bodies of the machine-spirit's casing were ageing rapidly, skin turning grey and flaking away, muscle and organ sinking into skeletal hollows. Faces decayed into bare teeth and black eye sockets.

*Omnissiah, grant us your aid!' shouted Hestion. *Delete not this ancient soul! Permit not this corruption!'

Crackles of red lightning played across the high ceiling forming blood-coloured fingers along the columns and walls. Distant voices chanted and gabbled, competing with Hestion's lone voice. One section of the wall bowed in and split, becoming the lids of a huge bloodshot eye that rolled madly. Hestion yelled and threw a handful of pure carbon into the circle, and the eye withdrew.

The vault was shuddering. Voices were flitting across the star fort's vox-net, carrying information about the enemy drawing closer. It was a grand cruiser, its shape well-known by the tactical histories accessed from the valley of datamedium in which the machine-spirit kept its immense reserves of knowledge. It was a flagship of the Iron Warriors, servants of Chaos. If Hestion did not fend off their daemonic attack, the Imperial Fists would never have the chance to look this enemy in the face.

Thick reddish veins blistered up from the floor and up the side of the machine-spirit's casing. Withered bodies broke and flopped aside, revealing the tangle of circuitry and cabling inside.

*Back! Back to the warp with you!' came the machine-spirit's voice, distorted to an atonal bray. *You will not have this soul! For ten thousand years I have wrought a grim end for your kind! I will not die now! Not now!'

Hestion looked around him. Corruption was flooding through the vault. Eyes were opening above him. The circle, the focus for his ritual, was distorting, new symbols appearing among the sigils of protection and warding.

*Flee!' said Hestion. *Move your spirit to your datamedium vault! Abandon this place!

*I cannot,' replied the Endeavour of Will, synthesised voice distorted. *It will follow me. There all my knowledge is vulnerable.'

*They will not follow you,' said Hestion. *I swear. I cannot hold it back here. I will not lose you. Flee, Endeavour of Will! Let this fight be mine!'

*Then Emperor's speed upon you, Techmarine,' said the Endeavour of Will. *What you have done for me will never be deleted.'

The lights on the casing turned dark. The bodies remaining fell limp, the cacophony of their machine-code silent and replaced by the wrenching of metal as the vault was warped and distorted by the daemonic virus seeking out a way to the machine-spirit.

Hestion extended his servo-arm and plunged it into the machine-spirit's casing. *In a few seconds you will reach this machine,' he said aloud, knowing that whatever was attacking the star fort could hear him. *And nothing I can do will stop that. But you will find no way to the machine-spirit. Your virus will follow the only path it can, the only one open to it, and that is me! My body! You will never reach it, because you have to go through me first!'

All the ma.s.s of profane knowledge that made up the daemon-virus, all the vastness of its hate and the torrent of its blasphemy, poured through Techmarine Hestion's body. Hestion jerked and spasmed as if in the throes of electric shock, fire spitting from the extremities of his armour. The edges of his battle-plate glowed red and the skin around his collar scorched as he cooked in the heat. Blood ran from his eyes and ears. He slumped to his knees but did not fall, muscles held rigid by the force of the current.

The daemon virus coalesced into a pair of triangular red eyes, blistering down from the ceiling of the machine-spirit vault. Monstrous features pushed against the steel of the vault from the other side of reality, gnashing mandibles twisted with anger, pseudopods bowing up the floor and pushing in the walls. The daemon's roar echoed through the chamber, competing with the howl of twisting metal and the crackle of the power coursing through Hestion.

Hestion ripped the dataprobe from the machine-spirit casing. The link was snapped. Its information spine broken, the daemon screamed, an impossible sound that was both loud and distant, a thunder from another dimension booming through the star fort. The whole vault was suddenly twisted as if wrenched in two opposite direction by a pair of gigantic hands, and shards of torn metal fell from the broken columns.

Hestion fell to the floor, smoke rising from him, blood dribbling from his face. He dragged himself half a pace and slumped again, all his energy drained away by the task of standing against the virus. He doubled up in pain as the vault collapsed around him. The whole ceiling loomed down as the fabric of the vault failed.

Hestion waited to die. He would be crushed as the machine-spirit vault collapsed on top of him. He had saved the Endeavour of Will. To die fulfilling such a duty was no bad death.

He was moving now. He thought the floor had partly collapsed into the maintenance deck below and was tilting, and that he was sliding towards a creva.s.se opening up. But what little of his sight remained caught a glimpse of a gold-armoured hand grabbing one wrist and dragging him away from the collapse, towards the vault entrance. Behind him the machine-spirit casing disappeared in a torrent of torn metal where he had been lying a moment before.

Hestion forced his head to turn. Skin tore away where it had been welded to his collar armour. But what he saw took enough of the pain away.

He was looking up at Captain Lysander.

Velthinar Silverspine recoiled in anger, shuddering the jewel-encrusted pillars of its temple. Slabs of silver fell from the wall, and the lesser abominations that attended on it, misshapen things like mosquitoes crossed with many-armed humans, squealed and flitted around in fear. One of Velthinar's many limbs swatted a couple from the air, slamming them against the temple walls.

Around the temple, which took up a good portion of the midsection of the Ferrous Malice, ran a gallery where supplicants and sacrifices could walk around the temple at Velthinar's eye level. At intervals along this gallery were statues looted from benighted, primitive worlds where the G.o.ds of the warp were worshipped, and their sacred power helped keep Velthinar manifest while the Ferrous Malice was in real s.p.a.ce. Onto this gallery emerged Warsmith Shon'tu, the only man on the ship who could walk into the presence of Velthinar when it was angry and not rile it up further.

Velthinar, if anything, sank down a little at the sight of the warsmith. It was here on the sufferance of the Iron Warriors leader, whether it liked it or not.

*You failed,' said Shon'tu.

It was not an accusation. It was just a statement of fact.

*I was betrayed!' replied the daemon. *Betrayed by ignorance! One of them was armed with the knowledge of their false machine-idol. That pitiful G.o.d of stupidity and rust! That its teachings should befuddle me so! Had I known I would have stripped that information from their minds and left them gra.s.s-eating imbeciles.'

*But you did not,' said Shon'tu. *Your virus form could not break the Endeavour of Will.'

*It will,' said Velthinar. *It will! The next time I will decorate the walls with the liquid mush I leave of their brains! I willa'

*There will not be a next time.'

The daemon Velthinar Silverspine resembled an enormous bloated insect, something that might be found clinging to a leaf on a poisonous jungle world but expanded to a t.i.tanic size. Its fleshy bulk could not be contained within its exoskeleton and bulged between the carapace plates in pallid hanging folds. It had legs, many of them, but its size was such that it could not hope to move normally, and it lay on its back with its head curled up over its thorax. Its carapace was iridescent and jewelled, like a suit of alien armour created by the finest craftsmen, with fine silver filigree over plates of deep blue that shimmered to purple. Its head was a ma.s.s of eyes and mouthparts, its mandibles sheathed in silver and decorative rings and jewels hanging from every piece of exposed flesh. Its eyes were orbs of red and blue, misty and swirling inside like a soothsayer's crystal ball. Its lack of apparent mobility was irrelevant given its role a its shadow form, the shape it took when shifted into the realm of information, was the form it used to do all its damage. It was the techno-virus that had destroyed the Bastion Inviolate, just as it was the insectoid horror that lurked inside the Ferrous Malice like a parasite in a hollowed-out organ.

*But... to me was promised the spirit of the star forts!' Velthinar's voice, issued from several sets of mouthparts, sounded like several chittering, sibilant voices clamouring at once.

*And you promised that you would cripple their machine-spirits and deliver them to us!' snapped Shon'tu. Velthinar's flesh rippled as it recoiled a little. *You will devour the Bastion Inviolate. That you have earned. But you did not deliver on your side of the bargain where the Endeavour of Will is concerned. The Iron Warriors will do with that star fort as we wish.'

Velthinar's many eyes narrowed. *If you think, warsmith, that a lord of the Silver Towers will be cowed by your anger...'

*Anger?' replied Shon'tu. *Why do you think I am angry?'

It was normally impossible to read expressions from the daemon's alien face, but the waggling of its mandibles and flexing of its forelimbs might well have indicated confusion.

*The lords of my Legion care only that a blow is struck against the sons of Dorn,' continued Shon'tu. *But what glory is there in watching their corpses tumble through the void? What pleasure can be gained from giving the kill to a creature such as you? Now, the Iron Warriors can face the Imperial Fists as it should be, face to face! The iron within us, and the iron without, will crush their entreaties to their Corpse-Emperor, and prove with whom the strength of the warp lies! Perhaps we need some humanity in us, daemon, to understand. Whatever I now am, I was once a human being, a man, and still I possess the jealousy and rage of a man faced with an enemy whose inferiority he cannot demonstrate. Now I can sate that anger with the blood of Imperial Fists! I give thanks to all the G.o.ds that you have failed, Velthinar. It is a gift from the warp! I am not here to remonstrate with you. I am here to tell you to stay out of our way until the killing is done.'

Velthinar was silent for a moment, limbs folding and unfolding as its various eyes came to focus on the Iron Warrior. *I begin to understand,' said the daemon, *why this task was given to you.'

The apothecarion of the Endeavour of Will was kept dark, the patients illuminated by the spotglobes that trained their lights on the prayer book over each bed. Automated manipulators turned each page at regular intervals, to make sure that if no one else was reading a prayer over the wounded, the eyes of the Emperor at least were looking on their words of devotion.

The Endeavour of Will had an apothecarion large enough for the wounded of an army. Now, however, it only had one patient a Techmarine Hestion, stripped of his armour and surrounded by medical servitors patiently weaving artificial skin over the wet red expanses of his burnt body.

Lysander watched the servitors work. Hestion was unconscious, kept in an induced coma by the autosurgeon pumping chemicals into his system. He could die then and there, or he could hold on for a long time. But Hestion was most certainly dying.

*His sacrifice will be remembered,' came a voice behind Lysander. Lysander turned to see another Imperial Fist in the doorway of the apothecarion. He walked into the ward, the dim light revealing him to be a lot younger than either Lysander or Hestion, a sergeant by his markings of rank, fresh-faced and relatively unscarred by the years of battle a s.p.a.ce Marine veteran endured. Young, thought Lysander, to have his own squad. Five Imperial Fists, wearing the same squad markings, followed him in.

*It is our duty,' replied Lysander, *to see that someone lives to remember.'

The sergeant held out a gauntlet. *Sergeant Rigalto,' he said. *It is an honour, First Captain.'

Lysander remembered the name. Every s.p.a.ce Marine in a Chapter at least knew of every other. Lysander remembered Rigalto as a line trooper, bright and respected, but not an officer.

*Those campaign badges,' said Lysander. *Agripinaa subsector.'

*You are correct, captain. Storming of the Basilica Pestilax.'

*Then that explains it,' said Lysander.

*Explains it?'

*Heavy losses at the Basilica. Your sergeant died and you took his place. Am I correct?'

*You are,' said Rigalto. *My honour and my despair. I saw him die, and could not stop it. One day he will be avenged.'

*Such things must be known by a captain of the Chapter without asking,' said Lysander. *We are spread so thin, we can die without our brothers knowing of it.'

*They will all be remembered, just like Techmarine Hestion,' said Rigalto. *In time, their names will be written down, when the enemy is driven back into the Eye.'

Lysander nodded. *That at least I can promise. Well, we have you and your squad, and myself. Who else holds the Endeavour of Will?'

*Scout squad Menander,' replied Rigalto. *They are on their tour of service, in preparation for elevation to full brotherhood. The station crew under Enginseer Selicron, and Astropath Vaynce.'

*And my command squad,' said Lysander. *Seventeen Imperial Fists, including myself. Quite the army, is it not?'

*And the Siege of Malebruk,' said Rigalto. *And the weapons of the star fort. Thanks to Hestion, the machine-spirit still has some of the weapons on-line.'

*Enough to kill Shon'tu,' said Lysander. *He banked on us being slain by his virus attack without his traitors having to raise their guns. Now he must give us a fight that we can win.'

*I have heard tell,' said Rigalto, *of the Shield of Valour. Of Malodrax. To us, those who were recruited after the event, it is told like a parable. But to you, it was real. It is memory. To fight alongside one whoa'

*Malodrax is in the past,' said Lysander, holding up a hand to silence Rigalto. *A battle is to be fought now, and it is to the present that I would have us turn our thoughts.'

*Then it is enough to say that we shall help you make the Iron Warriors pay for the Shield of Valour, and all that followed.'

Lysander's vox-link chirped. *Chrystis here,' came the transmission from the Siege of Malebruk.

*Speak,' said Lysander.

*Captain, we are under attack.'

From the glare of the system's sun, the waning red star Kholestus, the Ferrous Malice dived through sensor-baffling bands of solar radiation.

The Siege of Malebruk turned to face it, presenting a broadside which brought as many of its guns to bear as possible. In its tactical orrery, Chrystis and the ship's battle-cartographers used holographic void-maps and rulers and compa.s.ses alike to build up an a.r.s.enal of manoeuvres the Siege could execute depending on the actions of their enemy. On the Ferrous Malice far less natural things, crewmen possessed with daemons of cunning and corrupted machine-spirits, were doing the same.

Naval battle proceeded at its own pace, as if time meant something different when it came to ship-to-ship murder in the void. Torpedoes and broadside sh.e.l.ls proceeded not at the speed of gunfire, but lazily, spiralling through s.p.a.ce to intersect with the likely locations of the enemy. It was war in which geometry and helmsmanship counted for more than aggression and fearlessness, cold-blooded and removed compared to the thunder of face-to-face battle.

That cool detachment broke as the first sh.e.l.ls. .h.i.t home. The barrage from the Ferrous Malice's nose cannons speckled the hull of the Siege with silvery explosions, and inside, crewmen were shredded as metal deformed into bursts of jagged blades. Air shrieked out of hull breaches and damage control teams stationed beyond the inner hull died as the void boomed in to strangle and freeze them. Fires broke out, cutting off teams of crewmen with walls of flame.

The return fire from the Siege took its toll, hammering into the armoured prow of the enemy ship. Hull plates were torn free, and ribbons of frozen blood billowed out as the strange, half-living physiology of the ship was breached. The Ferrous Malice pa.s.sed under the Siege, both ships battered by the first exchange of fire.

The Ferrous Malice was the larger ship, a grand cruiser of a design long forgotten by the shipyards of the Imperial Navy, and it sported more firepower covering every angle of attack. But the Siege of Malebruk was a s.p.a.ce Marine strike cruiser, with far greater agility and a quick-witted machine-spirit that calculated thousands of attack solutions every moment at the same time as fending off the virus attacks from the mind of Velthinar Silverspine. The two spiralled around one another, the Chaos vessel in one moment seeming lumbering and slow, and in the next making the strike cruiser seem ma.s.sively outgunned and outcla.s.sed.

But this was just the overture. In a plume of purple black flame, alchemical rockets flared along the spine of the Ferrous Malice and slowed it down suddenly, twisting it into a reverse manoeuvre far beyond any Imperial-built ships of its size. At the same time its prow split open, revealing folds and tendons of vulnerable muscle, already torn and bleeding from the opening fire. From this biomechanical ma.s.s emerged the snout of a nova cannon. Few Imperial shipyards could forge such a weapon now, and none knew the secrets of creating the nuclear flame that now flared around the barrel as the weapon charged.

The crew of the Siege of Malebruk responded to this unexpected change in the battlefield by turning every effort towards evasion. The machine-spirit charted a crazed, jinking path that wrapped itself around the Ferrous Malice, too far for defensive turrets to open up against the strike cruiser but too close for the nova cannon to be brought to bear.

The nova cannon stayed silent. The Siege of Malebruk moved out of its arc of fire, even as the Chaos ship's alchemical rockets fired again to turn it back on itself again.

The Ferrous Malice had no machine-spirit. In place of an artificial intelligence roosted a host of data-daemons, insubstantial warp creatures that flocked to serve their master, Velthinar. They squabbled and fought faster than the speed of thought and, through the sheer bedlam that went through their inhuman minds, wove battle plans that no enemy could predict. Their p.r.o.nouncements were pa.s.sed on to the crew and the strange unwholesome creatures that writhed through the oil sumps of the engine decks. The insane command structure of the ship, with the Iron Warriors overseeing multiple castes of mind-slaves, possessees, daemons and mutants, should never have permitted anything so complicated as a warship to function a but the Ferrous Malice was a construct of Chaos, transformed into a voidbound asylum by millennia in the warp, and by some incomprehensible process all the madness produced a ship that could think and act faster than should have been possible for its size.

And so the Ferrous Malice rolled on its side, presenting a scarred expanse of hull to the enemy. The broadside guns mounted there did not fire, and the crew of the Siege of Malebruk took advantage of this unusual good luck to hammer out a broadside of their own, stripping away hull plating and ripping charred craters along the length of the enemy. Fires billowed out into the void as ammunition and fuel stores cooked off. The wounding was terrible, with laser turrets boring holes decks deep and vast areas of the Ferrous Malice depressurising and throwing struggling handfuls of crew into s.p.a.ce.

Then the hull peeled away of its own accord. Coils of muscle unravelled, whipping across the closing gap between the two ships and wrapping around the extremities of the Siege of Malebruk. The tentacles reeled in the strike cruiser, even as armoured beaks, like the mouthparts of some sea-dwelling kraken, emerged from the ruination of torn flesh and metal inside the Ferrous Malice.

The machine-spirit of the Siege of Malebruk had not factored in this turn of events. The ship had nothing to fight off the grand cruiser's predations. Up close it had its defensive turret fire, which was designed to shoot down approaching torpedoes and bombers, and would have scarcely any impact on the ma.s.s of the Ferrous Malice. It had the option to board, but aside from the few spare crewmen it could arm it had only the single command squad who had accompanied Captain Lysander to the star fort. The Ferrous Malice, meanwhile, was guaranteed to be br.i.m.m.i.n.g with mutants, psychopaths and worse.

The Imperial Fists on board, offensive as the presence of the Ferrous Malice was, would not throw their lives away boarding it and accepting certain death. They would do more good opposing the ship's undoubted intention to take on the Endeavour of Will. The order was given for the Siege of Malebruk's crew to abandon ship.

The Ferrous Malice had no intention of letting all those fleshy morsels go. Tendrils snapped out from its ruptured hull, snaring saviour pods and shuttle craft as they fled the Siege. Dozens of men and women died as their escape craft were smashed open, or were forced alive down one of the gullets that opened up within the biological ma.s.s beneath the hull of the Ferrous Malice. The armoured shuttle carrying the Imperial Fists weaved between spinning wrecks and the biological growths trying to ensnare it, the survival of five of the Imperium's finest warriors now down to nothing more than the encoded skills of a servitor-pilot and a hefty dose of fate.

The Ferrous Malice reeled the Siege of Malebruk into a close embrace. Beaks armoured with bone crunched into the strike cruiser's hull, ripping through decks and shearing off one of the ship's engine sections. Plasma coolant billowed silver-black into the vacuum, and the reactors discharged their power load in a storm of blue lightning. The shockwaves tore apart more escape craft, or shredded their guidance systems to send them tumbling without power in all directions.

The Chaos ship dismembered the strike cruiser, forcing ma.s.sive chunks of s.p.a.ceship into its many jaws. The machine-spirit of the Siege of Malebruk survived until the last, moving from one stack of datamedium to the next as parts of the ship were crushed or torn away. The strike cruiser was a gutted sh.e.l.l by the time it ran out of places to hide, and its existence winked out in the closing maw of the Chaos ship.