Slowly, it raised the weapon taken from the warrior whose face it wore, the glowing ribs along the weapon's back brightening as if sensing its intent.

But, it thought, a bargain was a bargain.

The whine from the weapon rose in pitch until it was a shrill of barely restrained power. It grinned with its stolen face and squeezed the trigger. A bolt of sun-bright light speared from the weapon. The bolt of energy struck the pillar and liquefied the workings at its core.

For a second the pillar quivered, the power it had projected around the station snapping, its tethers broken. It cracked with a sound of shearing iron. b.a.l.l.s of lightning formed and collapsed around the pillar's surface. Parchments charred to black sc.r.a.ps that fell amongst a deluge of sparks. Then it exploded in a wave of brilliant light.

By the time the Geller field generator, exploded the being some called the Changeling had long vanished, discarding its last face without a thought.

For a few minutes no one on Claros station realised what had happened. In the sheltered pa.s.sages people continued to talk, mumbling worries to each other, stirring food over the flickering heat of chemical burners, and laughing at grim jokes. Behind barricades the Helicon Guard watched and waited as they had for hours, muscles cramping from not moving, wondering when they would be able to sleep. The armour-clad White Consuls stood in a scattered selection of pa.s.sages, their minds calm, waiting for the next attack to pull them from inaction. In a lightless chamber Colophon sat immobile, the remaining astropaths ringing him in silence.

In the half-lit gloom of the command chamber Colonel Rihat turned away from the disappearing back of the Librarian. For a moment he had thought he had seen a flicker of emotion in Cyrus's eye, a glimmer beneath cold dark water. He had heard stories of the Adeptus Astartes, that they were mankind's final shield, made by the Emperor at the dawn of the Imperium. He had seen the truth of the stories, seen that those words could never approach the truth. He realised he had not understood them, that he could never understand them.

The shout snapped his head around, his thoughts vanishing at the terror in the voice. *The Geller field!' The officer looked at Rihat, eyes wide. Crimson runes began to flicker across control surfaces, angry red spreading around the chamber, parchment readouts spewing from the fingers of data servitors. *It's gone!'

Rihat's first thought was to ask why, but as the icy reality filled him he knew it was a useless question. The truth was blaring at him from every corner of the chamber. Their greatest defence had fallen and the enemy would be coming.

*Arm yourselves,' he shouted and drew his pistol. Alarm sirens began to sound a moment later.

The warp found the genatorium chamber in the seconds after the field failed. Blackened cylinders the height of hab blocks filled its floor. Each was a low-yield plasma generator that fed power to the station's central hub. The machines had functioned for millennia, beating with a steady pulse, holding at their hearts the power of suns. Servitors and engineers moved through the chamber, murmuring machine code and shaking blessed oil over their beloved machines. The first sign that something was wrong was a blurt of angry code from a monitor servitor. The enginseers moved to see what had troubled the spirits of their machines. Before they could take more than a step warning sirens filled the air. Runes indicating system failures flashed on control panels. Data parchment spooled onto the floor. The enginseers began to run for their control systems.

There was a shriek of shearing metal. Steam poured into the chamber as pipes ruptured. The enginseers and servitors close to the generators vanished in a wash of venting coolant. Across the station lights flickered and dimmed.

A generator burst, glowing fuel breaking through its layered metallic sh.e.l.l. Molten metal flowed like wax onto the chamber floor. Jagged-edged fragments of debris spun through the air. The remains of the broken machine began to judder, its wreckage twisting and writhing. Wires and cables coiled, bonding to mangled plates. Pistons snapped together into gigantic limbs. Warp flame flowed from component to component as something aware and alive pulled itself from the reshaping wreckage. It had a scorpion body of machine parts and a torso of smoking flesh the colour of cooling iron. A long head crowned by spear-like horns pushed itself from its shoulders. It reared up, raising piston-driven arms, roaring at the glory of its birth.

A second generator exploded, the being within it spinning a form from the ruin of its machine womb. The first born did not wait for its kin, but stalked to the chamber's sealed blast door, claws clenching in antic.i.p.ation. The door was forged of plasteel and layered adamantium, over two metres thick and eight metres tall. The creature paused for a second and then began to gouge through the armoured door, its eyes alight behind a mask of scorched bronze.

Cyrus moved down the central pa.s.sage at a run. Close behind him Valerian's Devastators followed with the remains of Galba's Vanguard squad. All thoughts of the signal and Colophon had pa.s.sed from his mind. The Geller field was down and warp ent.i.ties were breaking through into reality across the station. A dozen desperate fights outlined in s.n.a.t.c.hes of panicked vox traffic scrolled across his helmet display.

*Rihat,' he said, the vox chatter dimming as he linked to the colonel commander. *This is Cyrus, I am showing ma.s.sive internal damage data from the secondary plasma generator cl.u.s.ter.'

*Yes, Epistolary. Confirmed: we are seeing the same. Significant power loss and multiple bulkhead breaches moving along the primary access pa.s.sage.'

*We are moving to the blast door junction on the lower mechanical levels. Whatever is coming down that tunnel, we will meet it there. Order all units in the vicinity to that position.'

*So ordered. I will join you.'

The pa.s.sage they moved along curved to meet the junction following the circle of the central hub. Ahead, Cyrus could see a cruciform of four pa.s.sage openings, each many times his height. Arched doors filled a single pa.s.sage opening. The doors' surface was worked in bra.s.s relief with images of vast machines. At the doors' centre was the cog-haloed skull of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Beyond the blast door a broad pa.s.sage spiralled into the centre of the station where the red-robed tech-priests kept the mechanical heart of the station beating. In that heart something had sp.a.w.ned after the Geller field failed.

A wide semi-circular killing ground was forming in front of the closed doors. In the archways of the other doors Helicon Guard were setting up auto cannons, lifting drum feeds of fat rounds to meet the waiting breeches. Some with the black shoulder guards of unit officers were yelling at Guardsmen to form firing lines.

Cyrus reached the junction as the first blow hit the doors from the inside. They rang like a gong. All other sound died. Men and women looked up from their weapons, eyes fixed on the door, listening to the sound of the blow fade. Cyrus turned to face the door. To his side the four brothers of Galba's Vanguard squad spread out, the motors of their chainblades growling. Valerian hurried his squad back amongst the Helicon Guard, their bulky heavy weapons tracking to cover the doors as they moved.

*Epistolary, my command is nearly at your position,' Rihat's breathless voice crackled over the vox. Cyrus could tell that the man was running.

A second blow hit the doors. Dust trickled from the bra.s.s reliefs. The doors glowed red, a heat haze shimmering in front of them.

Cyrus had opened his mouth to reply to Rihat when the third blow struck. The doors burst apart. A vast shape pulled itself through the molten breach. Cyrus had an impression of eyes burning with a furnace heat above a taurian form fused with jagged spider legs. He felt dizzy, the presence and power of the beast beating on his mind like a forge hammer.

The beast roared, its breath a burning gush of vapour. Lines of tracer leapt to meet it, biting into its skin, scoring lines in its metal plating. Cyrus could hear Guardsmen shouting as they fired, terror mixed with defiance in a stream of expletives.

The creature stood for an instant as rounds and energy bolts sparked off its hide. Then it ran forward towards Cyrus and the first line of Guardsmen. It was fast a insect fast a its claws sparking on the deck, piston arms raised above its horned head.

Cyrus threw himself sideways. He hit the floor, the deck plates buckling beneath his weight. The Guardsmen in the first line were not so fast. The beast rammed through the line of bodies, its bladed forelimbs punching through meat and bone, iron fists pistoning down to mash and sever.

Cyrus was on his feet in time to see a second beast pull itself from the ruin of the doors. It looked on the scene with black eyes, a circular mouth of translucent teeth pulsing as if in hunger. Its flesh was a mottled red, the muscles of its arms fused with serrated splits of metal the height of a man. It gave a booming cry and followed its kin into the growing circle of slaughter.

The Helicon Guard lines fragmented, some holding, some running to die in the beasts' flesh-stripping breath. Cyrus took the scene in a glance, as he drew his force sword, blue fire licking its edge. This was no planned engagement; it was a b.l.o.o.d.y scramble against terror. Their opportunities to change the battle were like water spilling through their fingers. The two iron beasts were advancing side by side, vomiting warp fire onto those they did not rip apart. There was no sign of Rihat or his reinforcements.

*We must split them.' Cyrus said across the vox, charging towards the nearest creature. *Valerian, I will draw one to you. Fire once one is isolated. Brothers of Galba, take the legs.'

*By your will, brother,' Valerian growled in acknowledge-

ment.

Beside him, Cyrus sensed the four remaining Vanguard of Galba's squad follow him. The back of one of the beasts was twenty paces away. He could see the pale cartilage of its spine projecting from the slick sinew of its back. He pulled power into his mind, rolling it around, letting it gather hate from his psyche. He stopped ten paces from the beast. The four Vanguard sprinted past him, their death laments crackling through the vox.

He released a part of the power gathered in his mind, sending it out in front of him in an etheric shout of challenge. The beast paused, ragged blade edges dripping red, and turned to look at him. Cyrus looked into its black eyes as they reflected the light of gunfire, and raised his open palm. The beast charged.

This is not what I have seen, thought Cyrus, the thought a whisper in the cyclone of power in his mind. It will not end now.

Five paces away the beast reared, its back legs driving it on as its arms and forelimbs rose ready to bring its blades down on Cyrus. He let the power go. Power arced from his palm and flowed across the beast's flesh and iron hide. It staggered, forelegs crashing down to scrabble on the floor. Cyrus felt his mind digging into the machinery of the creature's body, hate and spite writhing through its components, fusing joints and stopping gears. The beast staggered. Cyrus could feel its power gathering to push back at him. He would not be able to hold it back.

The four Vanguard came at the beast's legs from the sides, chainblades swinging. Motor driven teeth bit into pistons and translucent tendons. Two legs crumpled. A leg whipped up and down, punching a metre-long blade through a Vanguard's helm and ramming on through his body, pinning it to the floor in a welter of blood.

The beast howled in Cyrus's mind, shrugging off his psychic shackles. The beast's body whipped forwards, its jaws closing on the head of a Vanguard with the noise of cracking armour. It lifted the s.p.a.ce Marine off the floor, chewing on armour and flesh before spitting it out with a gout of flame.

Two more gone to the ancestors, thought Cyrus. Two more gone in as many seconds.

*Valerian! Now!' he shouted. The Devastators fired before he had finished the order.

Valerian's squad carried heavy bolters, suspensor-cradled blocks of oiled machinery that cycled explosive rounds through their breeches in a rolling laugh of thunder. The beast arched back as explosions blistered across it spine, ripping wet shreds from its flesh. Somewhere out in the chaos that filled the junction, a Helicon gunner with more will than fear began to fire. Others followed, sputtering lines of sh.e.l.ls and pulses of las-bolts converging on the beast. Armour plates buckled and shredded under the hail of impacts. Yellow ichor bled from the beast's flesh. It tried to turn, its limbs thrashing as if it was trying to fend off a swarm of insects. It screeched, fire spluttering out with the noise as its legs collapsed. Cyrus was close enough to see the thing's black eyes as its pulped torso scrabbled amongst the ruin of its metal hide. It gave a final growl of rage and dissolved into wreckage and oozing flesh.

In the centre of the Helicon lines, the remaining beast sensed the end of its kin. It turned, its gaze sweeping across the scene, looking for the cause of its twin's demise. Its furnace eyes fixed on the seven s.p.a.ce Marines of Valerian's squad. It ran forwards, chewing men to glistening lumps beneath its strides.

Cyrus was already moving, forcing his way through the press of half-panicked Helicon Guard. He could feel the beast's rage drawing power from the warp as it ground a charnel path towards the Devastators. It was shredding reality in its wake. Half-formed daemons coalesced around its legs, like lesser fish drawn to the b.l.o.o.d.y kill of a shark. They were slug-like things, congealed out of split corpses, eyes wobbling in suppurating flesh. More of the Helicons began to run.

Valerian stood his ground with his brothers beside him. He was bare-headed, his bolter loose in his hands, controlled fury curling his lip. Unlike many of his brothers, he was unscarred by his century of war, his sculptural features of Sabatine n.o.bility unmarked. He raised his bolter, its barrel scorched by firing, smoke still coiling from its mouth. The beast raised its arm. Pipes jutted from its flesh, forming an irregular fist of tubes bound together by muscle. The beast sent a stream of molten rounds at the Devastators. One of the rounds found the helmet of a White Consul and punched him off his feet in puff of blood and liquefied ceramite. The rest of the squad did not flinch. Valerian waited for the target lock tone to steady, for the range to be optimal. The beast took another step.

*Fire,' said Valerian, and beside him the thunder of heavy bolter fire poured out towards the beast. It slowed for a moment, then crossed its arms over its head and torso, thick plates and blades overlapping to create a shield. It strode on into the storm.

Cyrus pushed aside a Guardsman. The s.p.a.ce around the beast boiled with daemon kind. Creatures formed of a boiling ma.s.s of tentacles and rotting flesh enveloped Guardsmen in acid embraces. The fire from the remaining Guardsmen had dropped to nothing: many were running, more were dead.

Cyrus raised his sword. The price he had paid for the power he wielded was a dull ache in his mind. A daemon creature made of boils and yellow tumours turned a slit eye on him. He stepped forwards.

Would this be it? Was this the moment he had seen?

Flames suddenly gushed through the daemons. Thick, oily fire crawled over rotting flesh, melting fat from rotting bones. Las-bolts punched into the dissolving forms in disciplined volleys.

*Lord Cyrus,' Rihat's voice crackled through the vox. Cyrus looked around to see the colonel commander striding forwards flanked by lines of bronze-armoured figures in black-visored helms. Red smears and soot covered Rihat's face. His right arm hung loose at his side, the sleeve wet and dark. But there was a defiant look in his eye, and in front of him the flamer units burned their way through the daemon sp.a.w.n. Creatures with too many limbs and eyes tried to pull themselves forwards even as they collapsed into cinders and smoke.

Cyrus realised that the stuttering roar of heavy bolters had vanished. He turned, looking back to where Valerian's squad had stood. Flames filled his vision, spreading across the junction floor. Beyond the fire the beast lifted a ruin of b.l.o.o.d.y meat and white fragments in an iron claw. Cyrus began to run through the flames, purity seals burning, armour blackening. His helmet vision darkened, compensating for the brightness of the fire, objects and movements becoming a series of coloured runes overlaying shifting shadows. The beast's movements were a bladed blur overlaid with a green grid of lines.

The three remaining Devastators backed off, weapons fire spitting up at the beast as it advanced. Cyrus came out of the flames, the world snapping back to brightness. He saw Valerian twist the priming handle of a melta charge, and duck a scything blade. He reached for the beast's armoured thorax. The beast reached down, piston jaws flicking shut, as it yanked the sergeant from the ground. It brought the dying s.p.a.ce Marine level with its furnace eyes. Valerian's hand closed on the detonator with the last of his strength. A sun-bright sphere swallowed the sergeant and the beast's arm with a shriek of super-heated air. The beast rocked back, a cry like grating steel splitting the air.

Cyrus took his last strides, muscles and armour straining, his mind pulling power through him in a raw rush. He realised he was shouting; the names of his fallen brothers, of the dead worlds and lost wars, pouring from his lips. The beast sensed him, turned, blades scything downwards. Cyrus struck.

The blow buried the sword to the hilt in oil-black flesh. Inky liquid gushed from the wound. It stank of promethium and decay. A soul-born rage poured from Cyrus into the blade. All he could feel was the tide rolling through him, the anger of his soul given form by the warp. He felt...

... blood dripping from his armour as he walks through a familiar door...

A thing with the head of a vulture is laughing. The sound is like a murder of crows....

An astropath turns in a cone of green light. The astropath is laughing. It has two faces...

He is fading to nothing...

Cyrus awoke to fading screams and dimming fires. He lay amongst the ruin of his enemy, the warped machinery draped with tatters of oily flesh that were slowly dissolving to a sickly sheen. His hand still clasped his sword, its edge glimmering with a fading echo of power.

Pulling himself to his feet he felt the fever-ache of the psychic power he had channelled. Every movement brought a dull stab of pain. He looked around, his vision filling with threat a.s.sessment icons. The dead were thick on the floor and pools of flame cast the scene in a mottled orange light. No threat icons. They had won.

Cyrus saw Rihat approaching. The colonel was limping slightly, his left arm b.l.o.o.d.y and cradled at his side.

*Victory, colonel,' Cyrus said with a grim smile.

Rihat did not smile back; he looked grey, pain held back by will alone. *The enemy has broken through in many places. I am not even sure if some of the defences still hold.' He grimaced as pain shot through his face. *I do not think they have penetrated into the civilian areas. Not yet.'

Cyrus heard the fatalism in the colonel's voice. *We will hold, colonel. We will hold no matter the cost.' A surprised look pa.s.sed across Rihat's face, as if he had puzzled out a hidden truth. He opened his mouth to speak. He did not get the chance.

The voice spoke inside their skulls. *By the power and grace of the G.o.d-Emperor of Mankind, and the authority and majesty of His Holy Inquisition, judgement is proclaimed on this place and on all souls within its bounds.'

It was a single psychic voice made of many telepathic minds all transmitting the same message. It echoed through the warp with such force that it filled the mind of every person on Claros station. It was an announcement of judgement, a herald of intent.

*All are judged lost and the hammer will so fall. Exterminatus is here declared. May the Emperor have mercy on all true souls.'

The voices faded. Rihat looked at Cyrus, fear and confusion playing across his face. Cyrus staggered as a wave of psychic energy hit. It was the bow wave of a fleet punching back from the warp into reality with hammer-blow force.

Around them shocked silence was breaking into blind panic.

No. Cyrus would not let everything be consumed by the Inquisition's judgement. Not again, not after the price they had already paid. He turned to Rihat, ordering the last two of Valerian's squad to his side with a gesture. *The Inquisition is here. Their ships will take some time to get within firing range. Get as many people as you can to the Aethon. We will break dock and outrun the Exterminatus.' He gave a ferocious grin. *They can try and stop us but we still have teeth.'

Rihat was frowning. *Colonel?' Cyrus said.

Rihat looked up at him. *The Inquisition knew that this place was under attack. But how? You and Colophon said that no messages could be sent?'

Cyrus suddenly felt cold. He thought of his visions, of the sensation of a future growing closer, a vision of an astropath turning in green light. An astropath with two faces. *Where is Colophon?' he growled.

*I do not know, lord,' shrugged Rihat.

Cyrus nodded, his eyes focused on nothing, his mind racing. Colophon: the word he had thought he had heard in the signal. He felt as if all the threads of choices and half-glimpsed futures were weaving together, tightening into single strand. He looked back at Rihat and his last two brother s.p.a.ce Marines. *The station is lost. Evacuate everyone you can, if I do not return you have command.'

Rihat turned and began to shout orders as Cyrus strode away. He knew where he would find what he needed, where fate was leading him.

*Where are you going, lord?' called Rihat.

*For answers,' growled Cyrus to himself.

There were nine ships. Five destroyers rode on bright cones of fire ahead of their greater sisters. Behind the destroyers were two Adeptus Astartes strike cruisers, their crenellated hulls coloured and marked with the deep sea blue of the Star Dragons. Beside them the spear-sleek hull of a Dauntless-cla.s.s cruiser sliced through the void. At the centre of them all was a vast craft of black metal, its hull capped with towers, its prow a golden point of swept eagle wings. At its birth it had been named for a hero of a lost past; reconsecrated in the service of the Inquisition it bore a name more suited to its task. The Sixth Hammer was an executioner, a slayer of worlds. One day it might return to the fleet from which it had been drawn, but at that moment it served the will of the man who watched Claros station grow nearer from its bridge.

Inquisitor Lord Xerxes watched the magnified view of Claros station on a vast holoscreen suspended in front of his throne. The view was stripped bare of tactical data and information icons. He did not need them, nor did he trust artificial aids to judgement. Judgement was a matter of clear-sightedness, something to be decided with the simplest tools and senses available to mankind. On the screen the warp-rift was a wound leaking swirling colours and tendrils of coiling energy. The station, or what remained of it, crawled with writhing ghost light. There was no hope for it, there never had been.

Xerxes turned the slot eyes of his iron face to the two figures that stood to his left. One wore segmented armour lacquered in arterial red over a powerful frame, his face hidden by a black cloth hood. The other was a spindle-thin form of clicking bra.s.s joints and desiccated flesh held together by bundles of tubes. The spindle figure wore no mask because it had no real face. Both were inquisitors, the only remaining two of the cell Xerxes had drawn around him. They had lost two of their number, one to the Accursed Eternity, another to folly, but their resolve had never wavered. They had hunted the creature called Fateweaver across the stars, executing the planets the daemon invaded, seeking for a way to cast it back into the warp for another aeon. Where they found the daemon they burned the ground from under it. They were the left hand of the Emperor and it was their duty as much as it was their right.

*The judgement has been spoken?' asked Xerxes, his flat voice coming from the horizontal slot in his mask.

*Yes,' said the spindle-bodied inquisitor in a mechanical voice. *The astropathic choir has transmitted it across the void. Any still alive on the station will know that judgement will be done.'

Xerxes nodded. *When we are in range the rest of the fleet is to begin the attack. Nothing is to be left for the warp.' He looked back to where the station's bronze hull writhed in the warp's grasp. *Nothing but ashes and silence.'

*Astropath.'

The word echoed in the empty silence of the astropathic chamber. The hunched figure in green turned his blind face to follow the fading noise as it reflected from the empty stone tiers.

*Cyrus? That is you, isn't it, my friend?' Colophon's voice added its own echoes to the empty gloom. The astropathic chamber lay at the heart of the station, a sanctuary as far from the advancing daemon forces as was possible. It was deserted, quiet, and dark. What need did the blind have for light?

Cyrus moved out of the shadowed arch of the entrance, armour purring with every movement. He had his storm bolter in his right fist, its twin mouths pointed at the hunchbacked old man. The blue surface of his armour was charred and streaked with drying fluids. He looked like a revenant dragged from a death pyre.

*It is Cyrus.' The Librarian's voice was a low growl. Colophon twitched towards him, his liver-spotted hands clutching the top of his cane. Bathed in the monochrome tint of Cyrus's helmet display he looked scared. No, he looked terrified.

*The Inquisition is coming,' Colophon stammered. *They will hammer this place to nothing and all of us with it. We should ga'

*Why did you deceive me?' Cyrus kept his distance from the old man, walking a slow circle around Colophon's green-robed form. The single targeting rune in his helmet display was an unresolved amber, pulsing over the old man.

*I have not deceived you.' Colophon stayed where he was, speaking to the air rather than following Cyrus's movements. Cyrus carried on, discarding Colophon's reply without thought.

*The signal, it has been puzzling me ever since we got here. How could it be sent when we were cut off as soon as the attack began? I am not as adept as you at astropathic transmission, but I touched the warp and felt that we were isolated as you said.'

Colophon drew his green robes around him as if against a chill wind. *I don't understand what you are saying.' He shook his head and took a few steps towards the door of the chamber. *We should go. We could escape on your ship, wea'

*But the signal did get sent. It drew me here, drew the Inquisition here no doubt.' Cyrus gave a humourless laugh. *Temporal distortion; you suggested it to me, and I did not consider an alternative.' The old man opened his mouth as if to say something, but Cyrus kept speaking, suspicion and anger making his voice a low rumble of restrained threat. *You sent the signal, Colophon. You brought me here, and you have brought the final execution of the Inquisition down on this place.'