*Pick it up ora'

Ramiel's fist slammed into the sergeant's guts and he brought his knee up hard as the man doubled over. The sergeant went down with a wet noise and lay on the floor, blood pooling around his mashed face. There was a soundless pause; men were staring from other positions across the colonnade.

*Well you're down there now, sergeant. Why don't you pick it up?' He smiled and took another drag of his lho-stick.

The sergeant came to his feet faster than Ramiel could blink. There was the polished glitter of a knife in his hand. Ramiel jumped back but the tip of the blade stabbed up under the edge of his armour. Suddenly there was blood splattering the floor. Ramiel lashed a kick at the sergeant, ignoring the pain flaring in his guts. People were running towards them. Suddenly all Ramiel wanted was to see the sergeant's blood pulse away, to see his head become a skinless skull. He came forwards fast and the sergeant lunged, the point of the knife scoring across Ramiel's breastplate. His hand went to the sergeant's face, fingers finding the softness of the eyes. The sergeant screamed. There were others around Ramiel, other people shouting, but he did not care. He pulled the knife from the sergeant's fingers and rammed it up under the man's chin. Blood gushed over him. He was laughing. There was a hand on his shoulder, pulling him. He turned and sliced a face from eye to chin.

A red haze formed in the air. Angry cries spread around Ramiel, figures bunching into knots of sudden violence. Someone opened up with a heavy weapon, hard rounds pulping through the growing crowd. The stone-tiled floor was slippery with dark fluid. There was a stink of offal in the air.

Ramiel kept moving, kept cutting and stabbing. His skin and armour glistened crimson. Around him fallen bodies began to twitch, dead fingers spasming, muscles bunching. Flesh twisted, bursting skin and venting fresh, bright blood. Ramiel could feel the murder hunger inside him like a beast. He raised his hand to cut again, to feed the beast.

Something sharp rammed through Ramiel's chest. He looked down at the black blade tip projecting from his ribs. He grinned a dead man's grin, swaying where he stood. Ramiel's mouth began to open wider and wider. With a sound of ripping sinew the form of an impossible thing pulled itself from Ramiel's skin. The creature sloughed off the sleeve of loose flesh. It was slick with blood, its tongue flicking out to taste the air. Its eyes were pits of reflective darkness in a long skull. It stepped forwards, its black jointed legs shaking with the freshness of its birth, its flesh a raw meat red.

A man who had been firing his lasgun into the fight looked at the newly born daemon and opened his mouth. The daemon bounded forwards, the black blade in its hands leaving a trail of smoke as it cut. The man never had a chance to scream.

The daemon looked around seeing more waiting kills, hearing the pulse of the living calling to it. More of its kin came, pulling themselves from the bodies of the dead and the pools of blood. Lifting the severed head of its first kill the daemon raised its flayed skull face and howled.

It had been the wrong way to clear his mind, thought Cyrus. Walking the station had seemed like a good way to work out troubling thoughts. Armoured in cleaned plate he had paced through the silent halls and the service tunnels where the station's population sheltered as far from the outer areas as possible. They looked at him and he could feel the fear in their eyes. People crowded the service tunnels: menials, prefects, techno-mats, and their families. They formed tight cl.u.s.ters, huddled around a few possessions, talking in low voices as if the sound of raised voices were indecent.

There was a tension in the close atmosphere, panic held just below the surface. He had hoped to gain some clarity of thought, but the atmosphere seemed to infect him with a mixture of fear and caution. He tried to let his thoughts unknot, tried to focus on presenting a soothing presence to the people that looked at him. It was not working. In no small part that was the fault of Hekate.

*It was only the first, and the weakest, attack that we will see.' Hekate's harsh voice rang out. She had chosen this time to impart her thoughts on the situation, following him as he walked the station, staff clicking on the deck in time with her steps.

Hekate had not been present at any of the two a.s.saults on the station. She had been noticeably absent, only appearing afterwards to question survivors and make dire predictions. Cyrus pursed his lips. He could almost hear the look of superiority on her face.

*We held the breach,' growled Cyrus.

*No, we did not,' she spat. *You held the breach. If it had not been for you and your brothers the enemy would have forced through our defences.'

People were looking up at the raised voices, the air tightening. Cyrus had nearly reached the end of his patience. A thick ache had begun to spread across his head. All he could think about was the holographic image of a blind face repeating a single word just beyond hearing again and again.

He stopped and turned, looking down at the woman, catching the surprised look in her eyes, anger slipping his control.

*Are you not a primaris? What is it that you fear? You have lent no aid to the defences apart from your observations. Is there something that keeps you in the shadows?'

*Ia' she began, but Cyrus was in no mood for what she might have said. He leant forwards.

*You may speak the truth and know much, but you seem blind to the fact that we either stand together or we die. The enemy we face will destroy us from within as easily as it will from without.' He looked around at the people huddled and silent at the edge of the pa.s.sage. *You do not see this? You know much of the enemy that faces us, more than Rihat, more than I. But you do not see this?'

He looked at the marks of the Psykana tattooed on her scalp and woven into the cloth of her storm coat. An expression that he could not place ghosted across her face. *Is there something you fear, mistress? Something you know of this enemy that makes you afraid?' She held his gaze and a previously unformed question dropped into his mind. *What is your purpose here?'

*I cannot say.' There was a low almost fearful note in her voice that surprised Cyrus. *I tell you the truth that I see. That is what I am here to do. That is the help I give.'

Cyrus gazed at the woman, a suspicion forming in his mind. The Inquisition had servants in many places and drew its acolytes from many quarters. Did such a secret servant stand before him now? There was a regal surety about her that made him wonder what she really was. *How long have you been here, Mistress Hekate?' he said quietly.

*A little over a month, Brother-Librarian,' she replied, her voice brittle.

*And before that?'

*I cannot say.'

Cyrus smiled but it did not reach his eyes. He was thinking of executed worlds, and the hand that wielded that final judgement. What was she?

Hekate looked away, suddenly appearing hunched and tired as she leant on her staff. *Another attack will come,' she said without looking at him. *You should know that the varieties of daemons that attacked were of many orders. Such creatures only overcome their own rivalries when great powers turn them to a single purpose.'

The image of an astropath speaking a broken plea for help flashed through his mind, and a word came to Cyrus's lips. *Fateweaver,' he said.

Hekate shot him a hard look. For a moment he thought he saw surprise and fear in her blue eyes.

*That is a name that should be spoken with care,' said Hekate with careful control.

Cyrus was about to speak but the ache in his head suddenly blossomed to press against the inside of his skull. The crystals of his psychic hood were sparking. He blinked, opening his eyes to find red light flooding the pa.s.sage. Alarms filled the air. His vox-link was screeching with panicked voices. He heard the word *incursion' spit from the static and started running. He had ordered Phobos to be ready as a counter-attack force. The sergeant and his Terminators would reach any breach first.

*Phobos,' he shouted into the vox. As the sergeant replied Cyrus thought he could hear a whispered word repeated again and again.

Overwhelmed. It was not a word Phobos had often needed to contemplate. Layers of ceramite and adamantium, crafted at the birth of the Imperium, and his skill as a warrior made the word as irrelevant to him as a blow from a flint axe. But the word rang in his mind: undeniable, certain.

A lattice of fire overlaid the scene before him, spitting from his storm bolter, interweaving with that of his brothers. Four of them; there were four of them to turn the tide. A killing rage had engulfed the troops in the fourth wing of the station. Hundreds of Helicon Guard had become a churning sea of hate and murder. They stabbed and hacked at anyone in reach, shouting vile words through torn lips. Amongst the men the daemons moved: black iron blades sizzling as they cut through the press of bodies.

Phobos and his three brothers had pushed into the carnage, hurling the mob back with a torrent of explosions. For a few moments the b.l.o.o.d.y tide had faltered. Then it had enfolded them like closing jaws.

Phobos's shoulders almost brushed those of his brothers, his eyes flicking from target to target, as he aimed, a.s.sessed and fired. His mind was focused solely upon the tactical data, which told him that they could not win. But this wing of the station was close to falling, and if it did the murderous tide would spill past all of their defences. He had made an oath that he would stand against this enemy: that he would not let them pa.s.s.

*Nevra, firestorm pattern,' said Phobos calmly. He remembered the hundreds of oaths he had made over decades of war. He had never failed to honour a single one and he was not going to do so now.

A clutch of Helicon Guard came towards them, eyes white, screaming in rage. There was no sanity left in them, no perception of what they had been, only a l.u.s.t for death and blood.

*By His will,' came Nevra's stony voiced reply. The missiles shrieked from the Cyclone launcher on his shoulders. The first missile hit, then the second, then the rest, each overlapping blast growing into a shrapnel-laden fireball. For a moment the murderous tide seemed to ebb. Phobos smiled grimly to the inside of his helmet as a black cloud mushroomed up to spread dirty smoke and yellow tongues across the ceiling far above. The floor shook and his armour whined as it compensated.

They came out of the fire in a wave of serrated blades and howling faces marked with jagged cuts. Men ran amongst the daemons, their flesh charring as they danced in the flames, howling triumph into the torched air.

*Close formation,' said Phobos. His brothers closed on him, shoulder to shoulder, a white armoured diamond amongst the slaughter. *Fire on all targets,' he shouted, his storm bolter already roaring as the tide closed over them.

It was close now. Alarms blared as it walked down the pa.s.sage through pulsing red light. Cl.u.s.ters of flesh-born in red and ochre uniform rushed past. It could taste the fear in their thoughts. The children of slaughter had begun their work. Perhaps they would succeed, but it doubted they would; they were so unsubtle, only useful in creating terror and spilling blood. It had masqueraded as such beings many times, had mimicked their blink-quick reactions and their death thirst. It understood them from within and without. They would kill and glory in their ma.s.sacre, but powerful enemies stood against them: the strongest of the flesh-born, the s.p.a.ce Marines. They had the strength to perhaps stand even against the Taker of Skulls' children. But whether their attack succeeded or not was no matter. Within its multi-faceted mind it smiled. Fear and confusion filled the station and that made the fulfilment of its bargain all the easier. As it had intended.

The hurrying flesh-born pa.s.sed, paying it no attention. It had chosen this face carefully. The person it had stolen it from was a functionary of modest authority, not high enough to draw too much attention, not so lowly that anyone would question that it walked alone against the flow of movement. It was its third face since it had entered the station, and it hoped that it would need no more.

Turning into an arched door off the main pa.s.sage it raised a cipher talisman to a sensor panel. A heavy blast door pealed back into the oily walls. It had taken the talisman from the owner of the face it wore. Functioning technology was one of the few things it could not imitate. The pa.s.sage beyond was quiet and bathed in cold light. It could feel the presence of what it sought. It was close, so close now. Behind it, the armoured door ground shut as it walked into the electric twilight.

*Phobos?' Cyrus said in his ear.

Phobos sent a burst of sh.e.l.ls into the face of a creature of glistening muscle. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye as a blow flicked towards his shoulder. He brought his sword around to meet it. The power field crackled and spat sparks as it met a blade of smoking black iron.

*Yes, Brother-Librarian,' said Phobos, voice straining, muscles and armour bunching as he forced against the inhuman strength of the creature. It opened its mouth and its pink tongue tasted the air. He brought the muzzles of this storm bolter up under the creature's face and fired.

*We are almost with you. Hold, brother, for the primarch, hold,' said Cyrus, his voice distorted by static.

Phobos heard his storm bolter dry cycle as the last round spat from its muzzle. At his back there was a pillar of black stone the width of a battle tank. To his left Nevra was firing short bursts, the Cyclone launcher on his back empty, the teeth of his chainfist thick with viscera. To his right Valens stood, blood streaming from the mangled ma.s.s of his helmet; the stump of his severed gun arm dribbled blackening liquid onto the floor. It was barely credible that the veteran still stood let alone fought.

They had driven into the horde of daemons and crazed Helicon Guard, they had thrown dozens back into the immaterium, but it was not enough. Out across the vaulted chamber the horde grew, seeming to swell even as they cut it down. They had lost Gratian, his armour split from helm to gut by a shrieking blade. The enemy had forced them back until they were three figures in gore-painted white, their backs against the pillar. They were too few and the enemy too many. The fourth wing of the station was about to fall.

Phobos met a downward cut at his face, let it whistle past him as he flicked his sword around, slicing a figure from shoulder to hip. Another leapt into the s.p.a.ce left by the collapsing body. To his right Nevra's gun went silent.

*No, brother,' said Phobos, his voice low and calm. *The enemy will break through before you reach us. Our oaths will not be kept.'

There was a second of silence, and then Cyrus's voice came back. *I hear.' There was an edge to his voice.

To Phobos's left Valens staggered, his knee crashing to the ground, splintering marble, blood seeping from rents in his armour. Valens brought his power fist up to meet a black sword in a fountain of sparks.

*You know what must be done, brother.' said Phobos. *I have failed and now there is only one price to pay for victory.' There was a pause. Phobos could almost see his brother weighing-up what Phobos meant, the implication of his words. *It was what we were made to do; it is our fate.'

*As you will it,' said Cyrus.

Phobos felt a sharp impact across his right shoulder as ceramite splintered under warp-forged iron.

*I go to the ancestors,' said Valens from beside Phobos, the words a wet gurgle in his throat. They were the words of lament and pa.s.sing spoken for the dead who could not speak for themselves. The words reminded Phobos of the smoke of funeral pyres trailing across the blue skies of Sabatine.

Phobos stabbed at a creature in front of him. He smiled grimly.

*I go to the ancestors,' repeated Phobos, and the voices of Valens and Nevra rose in broken chorus.

*As they are the past, so shall I be.'

Phobos dropped his storm bolter, hand lunging forwards to grasp a creature's twisting horns.

*As I am, so shall all be.' The words of the three Terminators echoed across the vox.

Phobos brought the edge of his sword up under the creature's neck in a sawing sweep that scattered drops of burning blood into the air. Throwing the severed daemon's head at its kin, he lunged at them.

*I am the dead and I will pa.s.s through the gates of my ancestors.'

Outside the station the macro cannon and lances of the Aethon began to rotate. Plasma flushed into reactors and energy wells, the fury of suns snarling in its shackles.

Phobos could see Valens beaten down at the edge of his sight, lifeblood trailing from his arm as he tried to raise it.

A blow struck Phobos's helmet, carving through into his face and eye. Blind, he rammed his weight forwards and brought his sword around like a scythe, feeling it bite through flesh and bone. He reached up and pulled the helmet from the ruin of his face. The daemon tide stood before him.

*I go to the ancestors!' he shouted, and the world suddenly filled with bright light.

The beams of energy from the Aethon hit the fourth wing of the station a third of the way down its length. The lance strike cut the section from station like a limb from a corpse. The rest of the station shuddered as if in pain. Venting molten debris and burning air, the wing fell away taking the four lost White Consuls to their ancestors. An instant later macro cannon sh.e.l.ls. .h.i.t the severed section and it became a brief blaze of light smeared against the black void.

There were five s.p.a.ce Marines between it and its objective. They wore white armour and blank-faced helmets with red eyes. It had antic.i.p.ated that they might be a last obstacle to it fulfilling its bargain. Having antic.i.p.ated them, it was ready.

It came round the corner wearing a new face, the face of a tech-adept long dead and reduced to ash in a dark corridor. The five stood around a sealed blast door covered in strips of parchment attached with red seals. The final door.

*Halt,' said a s.p.a.ce Marine with a red helm, and pointed a weapon at it. The rounded muzzle was venting shimmering gas with a rising hum. The other five s.p.a.ce Marines raised their weapons.

*I come to do my duty, honoured warriors.' The face's voice was a plaintive whine filtered through a mechanical throat. *See, I bear the writ of service and this is the appointed hour.' The weapons aimed at it stayed silent but did not waiver. These were no weak-willed creatures filled with doubt and fear. It was within a few paces now. It could feel the decision to fire forming in their minds. Vetranio: that was the leader's name. It took a step forwards and changed its shape.

Its new shape was faster, much faster. It was on Vetranio in a single bound, bone claws the size of scythe blades punching through his eye pieces. It changed again, its shape becoming that of the dead s.p.a.ce Marine. It plucked the gun from Vetranio's dead fingers as he fell. It turned, shooting a stream of energy into the heads of two of the s.p.a.ce Marines. Two remained. They fired at the same instant. It felt something that it understood as pain.

It dropped the weapon and changed its form into a boiling ma.s.s of flesh and half-formed faces. Blue fire burned from its eyes and along its limbs. Explosive rounds. .h.i.t it and it felt chunks rip from its unreal flesh. It leapt at the two s.p.a.ce Marines, glittering droplets trailing after it. They tried to fight but its touch cooked them inside their armour.

When the charred armour no longer twitched, it bent down and picked up the weapon it had dropped. Wearing Vetranio's face it turned towards the sealed portal. The layered doors slid open one at a time, and it saw its prize.

Cyrus watched the fires die and bleed off into the void. The command hub of the station was a circular chamber in the neck below the central astropathic chamber. Light from screens on stone daises diluted the gloom. The crew at each dais stared grimly at their readouts and dials, trying not to look as the remains of the severed part of the station cooled to embers on the viewscreen above them. Cyrus could feel the funereal hush around him, the numb disbelief at what had happened, at what he had ordered done. Beside him Rihat stood at attention, his thin face grey.

Cyrus had come here as soon as he had given the Aethon the order to sever the overwhelmed wing from the station. The rest of the White Consuls were in position ready to respond if another attack should come. He, though, had to see it for himself. On the screen the fading explosions were a red-hued ripple in the sickly haze of colour and substance that hung over the station. Looking at the fading after-image he felt empty, unreal, as if he had looked into a mirror and seen someone else looking back at him.

It was the only way, he thought. If he had not ordered the Aethon to destroy what was already lost then the rest of the defences would have fallen soon after. It had been necessary, the kind of choice that had angered him when he had seen its results in the ashen wastes of Kataris. He was the executioner this time; his choices had committed his brothers, and hundreds of others, to oblivion.

*Enough,' he said softly. *Cut the view-feed.' Rihat motioned and the viewscreen flicked to flowing green readouts of the station's systems.

*Do you have any further orders, lord?' said Rihat, looking up at him with stiff formality.

*No, colonel commander. Not at present.' He nodded as Rihat saluted and stalked away, brittle formality overlaying anger and disbelief. Cyrus could not fault his response.

Almost involuntarily Cyrus took the milled disc of the holo-projector out of a pouch. It held the message that had drawn him here, the message that no one had sent. It sat on the palm of his gauntlet for a second, then the cone of green light sprung up from its surface. The ghost-green figure of the astropath rotated again in front of his eyes.

*...report... Claros... the enemy beyond...'

This broken stream of words had brought him here, it had placed him here. He had watched and listened to these words so often that he heard his memory speak them as much as he heard the recording.

*...lies... Fateweaver.... we were blinded... failing...'

Something about the signal had troubled him since he first reviewed it. Somehow it felt familiar, almost as if he had heard it long ago.

*Soul... that hear this...'

Should he have followed its call? Was it a trick?

*...send... help...'

But it felt so familiar.

*Colophon...'

His vision snapped into focus, senses suddenly sharp. The image continued to rotate and speak through its familiar loop.

*... accursed eternity.' The image blinked and began its loop again. Cyrus watched it, his ears straining for the word that he was sure he had heard. It did not occur again. He cycled through the signal but it was as it had always been, a broken string of words s.p.a.ced with patches of distortion. Had his mind filled a s.p.a.ce with a stray thought? He clicked off the projection, looking around at the command chamber without seeing. If he had somehow heard an extra portion of the signal that was not there before, what did it mean?

Colophon. He had not seen the senior astropath for hours. The old man was attending to the recovery of the remaining astropaths in his charge. A stray word heard in a signal sent by no one; could it mean that Colophon would send the signal? That it was a plea from a point in time not yet reached?

Face set into a stone-hard expression, Cyrus strode from the command chamber. A new question had begun to coil around his thoughts like a poisonous snake: what else could the word Colophon in a signal from the future imply?

It stood and looked up at the pillar, watching the power crackle over its black surface and stir the strips of parchment. The thing was abhorrent; even being this close made the skin of its stolen flesh crawl. The s.p.a.ce around the pillar was filled with eddies of power that tugged at its substance. The pillar projected a veil far out from this chamber, enclosing this place and keeping its kind away from the prey they sought, the prey that they had hunted across worlds and through time. It had seen veils of this kind before, enclosing the ships of the flesh-born as they hurried through the warp. Like riptides woven into a spun gla.s.s curtain, they kept those ships safe. That was until they failed. With the veil around this place gone the rest of its kind could reach their prey. There would be much slaughter among the flesh-born.

For a second it considered whether to keep to its bargain. It would gain much, that was true. An endless amount of possibilities and favours would be its to claim, and bargains with the greater kind were difficult to break. But it was a creature of lies and the delight of the unexpected change was delicious. If it left here now the energies sustaining its kin would eventually dissipate in the poisonous nature of the flesh-world. This place would stand. The flesh-kin would endure. The blind prey hiding amongst them would survive and rise from its weakness again. And what then? What possibilities would there be then, what endless unforeseen new permutations and changes to fate?