Thaddeus ran alongside the storm troopers and fired once at a servitor turning to spray fire at them. The autopistol barked and a glittering trail fol-lowed the bullet. Its armour-piercing tip and micro-guidance systems let it punch repeatedly through the glossy carapace of the servitor before run-ning out of propellant.

Its concentrated explosive core detonated in the heart of the servitor and blew it apart in a shower of frozen flesh and shimmering metal.

Adeptus Mechanicus specials, the pinnacle of per-sonal armaments technology. Now Thaddeus was using them to get him out of a spot where it was the Mechanicus that wanted him dead. There would be a moral in there somewhere if Thaddeus survived long enough to work it out.

Thaddeus managed to spend two more priceless rounds of ammunition blowing another servitor out of the air, and the frantic h.e.l.lgun fire accounted for three more as the storm troopers ran to the clos-est junction that would lead them upwards towards the next levels.

Telleryev!' yelled Kindarek as the storm troopers made it to the next level and took cover behind a huge sculpture. 'Take three men and keep them occupied! The rest watch the boss's back!'

Thaddeus nodded at the lieutenant and took the hook-up equipment from a hip pocket of his suit. It was a simple portable cogitator linked to a data-slate by a thick bundle of wires, with various interfaces leading off on yet more wires. Thaddeus fumbled with the device as he crouched by the sculpture feeling the sudden hot flashes of laser blasts pa.s.sing close by.

He couldn't find an interface. He pa.s.sed his hands over the clear, angular crystal surface but there was no way in. Would he fail here because he had been stupid enough to a.s.sume the Mechanicus would use standard interfaces?

No - there was something, at the base of the crys-tal. A metal panel was bolted to the surface, an ugly flaw in the crystal. A data-thief probe extended from the plate into the body of the crystal and provided a low-tech way in. The data-sculptures were tech-nology from a previous age and the Mechanicus had obviously lacked an equally elegant way of using them - they had been forced to make do with the technology they had, and that was the same technology used across the Imperium.

Thaddeus plugged one wire into the crude inter-face. There was a pause and suddenly the data-slate was full of solid information, dense columns of binary pouring across the screen.

The program loaded onto the cogitator had been almost as expensive in its own way as the bullets in Thaddeus's gun, taken from a tech-heretic that Thaddeus had helped capture back in his interroga-tor days.

The Hereticus had ordered that the heretic be left alive so the Inquisition could make use of his skills - the man had escaped and Thaddeus had been a part of the mission that had finally killed him. The program he had given the Inquisition before his escape was a decoder, powerful enough to crunch through the encryption of just about any secure information source but simple enough to fit onto almost any computation device.

Skrin Kavansiel had been the man's name. A mad-man who had turned servitors and industrial machinery into rampaging monsters across half-a-dozen worlds in the Scarus sector, all in the name of the Change G.o.d. Thaddeus had shared the kill him-self with two other interrogators on an agri-world near the galactic core. That Kavansiel had been allowed to live the first time had sowed the doubts in Thaddeus that Lord Inquisitor Kolgo had con-firmed - the Inquisition was not the single, focused instrument of the Emperor's justice that he had learned of when he was first groomed as an inter-rogator. Half the time, it might as well be fighting itself.

The cogitator broke the ma.s.s of information down into categories and homed in on the records of Adeptus Mechanicus installations and personnel throughout the Stratix sector. There were still tril-lions of sc.r.a.ps ofinformation in there - at least, thought Thaddeus as laser fire spattered around him and short, gargled screams told of troopers dying, the information vaults were all connected.

He only hoped that the sculptures shattered below them had not contained the information he needed.

'Gak me sideways!' someone shouted. 'Com-pany!'

Thaddeus glanced upwards. There were lights now in the darkness at the top of the cylinder, powerful spotlights swinging through the shadows. The lights picked out ropes coiling downwards and figures rappelling down them, troopers in rust-red jump-suits, guns slung on their backs.

'Frag, tech-guard!' said Kindarek.

Half the storm troopers were still pinned down by the servitors. Thaddeus didn't hold out much hope that those who remained could deal with crack tech-guard troops firing on them from above.

He spotted a couple of tech-priests directing the tech-guard, robed and hooded adepts armed with shimmering power axes and exotic weaponry that sent bolts of power burning down at the storm troopers.

The data-slate began to sort through the informa-tion according to the same codewords that Thaddeus had used to filter astropathic traffic - Soul Drinker, purple, Marine, spider, a host of others.

As the screen seethed with information Thaddeus switched to the vox frequency he had reserved for the shuttle.

Thaddeus to shuttle. Target above us, multiple hostiles. Make it count.'

'Received.' came the servitor's mechanical voice, the signal warped by the intervening liquid hydro-gen.

'Shuttle out.'

A fountain of hydrogen burst out of the lake and with a roar the shuttle's stealth engines kicked in, ripping it out of the lake and sending it hurtling upwards like a bullet from a gun. Once clear of the lake the main engines erupted and the shuttle rose on a plume of flame, past the lowest walkways and upwards.

The data now rushing through the uplink device still poured through the cogitator in awesome amounts.

Every Mechanicus outpost from the pre-sent day back to the time of the Great Crusade was listed, with staff lists, schematics, work rotas, research reports, accounts, tech-prayers, and all the ephemera of the Mechanicus's immense operation.

Thaddeus keyed in the last command he had -the order to sort the data by the staff list Sister Aescarion had recovered from the outpost on Eumenix. A few hundred names that represented the last hope - maddeningly, everything Thaddeus needed to know was probably streaming past in front of his eyes, he just had to pick it out from the ocean of information.

The datastream thinned. A blinking green light on the frame of the data-slate told Thaddeus that the information was concise enough for the cogitator to hold. Thaddeus pressed a switch and the informa-tion was seared onto the cogitator's memory.

Maybe it was enough. Maybe there was nothing there but trivia. Thaddeus would have to take the chance, if he survived. That was a big if.

The shuttle soared upwards shattering its way through walkways as it went. Mounted guns on the half-glimpsed structures above pumped a stream of sh.e.l.ls into the shuttle, ripping through the armour plates and sending sudden, shocking gouts of flame bursting from the engine hous-ings.

The first tech-guard were landing on walkways high above, sending down hails of rapid-firing autogun shots. The freezing air was full of shrapnel and vapour. Thaddeus saw Sergeant Telleryev ripped clean in two by one of the last servitors, his insides turning to a mist of crimson shards even as two of his men were shot off the walkway by tech-guard fire. Thaddeus blasted twice, three times, and three tech-guard were picked off their rappel lines by ammunition they could only have dreamed of using one day.

The shuttle's engine blew and clouds of vapour bloomed around it. Its rise peaked and it began to fall, just a few metres beneath the levels the tech-guard were now landing on.

The servitor-pilot, working to hardwired proto-cols Thaddeus himself had installed, switched the shuttle's fuel cells into reverse, pumping high-grade prometheum derivative backwards until it flooded through the ignition chambers.

The fuel ignited and incinerated everything in the c.o.c.kpit and crew compartment in an instant. The servitor-pilot was atomised, metal components melted to gas, flesh disappearing.

The hull of the shuttle failed under the stress of the explosive forces within. With a thunderclap and a flash of flame that turned the crystal cathedral a blazing orange, the shuttle exploded, and boiling flame filled the top half of the cylinder.

Vapour, like a falling sky, billowed downwards and washed over the storm troopers. Thaddeus was blinded, bright white turning dark.

The vox was a mess of static. For a few seconds he was alone, encased in cold and confusion, fumbling blind as he tried to stuff the data-slate into the pocket of his HE suit. The shadowy shape of a storm trooperstumbled by then fell out of view, slipping over the edge of the walkway as random autogun fire spattered down through the darkness.

Something huge was falling. The sound of shat-tering crystal cut through the din, a high fractured crash growing rapidly closer. Shards of crystal, like huge gla.s.s knives, plunged through the darkness and the air was full of filaments. Spikes of icy cold jabbed at Thaddeus as fragments of crystal punc-tured his suit and cold air jetted in before the fabric tightened around the tiny wounds.

The huge burning hulk of Thaddeus's transport ripped down from above, trailing ribbons of flame, carving through the dense vapour like a comet. It took half the walkways with it, countless strands of the crystal web snapping, information vaults shat-tering into a blizzard of fragments. Men were screaming as they fell. Thaddeus expected any sec-ond to be dragged down with them, or to have his HE suit sliced open and his muscles turned to slabs of frozen meat.

The transport impacted far below, and a fraction of a second later the top layer of liquid hydrogen ignited.

The containment fields, designed to divert the energy of any ignition away from the information vaults above, compressed the heat and Shockwave downwards and outwards. But the hydrogen kept burning as the transport plunged through it and then its plasma drive imploded. Without the con-tainment fields, the whole lake would have burned and turned the cathedral into a column of flame, incinerating everything inside. Instead, the explo-sion was forced down into the root of the cylinder, where the ferrofibre walls met the rock of Pharos.

The walls of the cylinder fractured catastrophi-cally, great black fissures rippling up the walls. The air shrieked out into the hard vacuum beyond, sucking men and debris with it. Thaddeus grabbed the data-vault beside him as razor-sharp crystal shard whipped past. Storm troopers and tech-guard tumbled past, flailing hopelessly.

The hydrogen lake, designed to keep the informa-tion vaults stable, had instead led to the whole cathedral being destroyed. The Adeptus Mechani-cus, in their obsession with technical perfection, had missed the obvious danger. It had never occurred to them that anything hostile could sur-vive the extreme cold and the servitor-warriors, or that anything could detonate the lake with such ferocity that the confinement fields could not cope. It was holy ground, and holy information was invi-olable.

The upper echelons of the Mechanicus could not imagine that a desperate, lone inquisitor would invade the Omnissiah's sanctum and would bring with him all the random, chaotic factors that could destroy it.

The irony was momentarily lost on Thaddeus as the columns broke away from the ceiling and swung around him, churning up the broken crystal into a storm of razors. Thaddeus's section of walk-way broke away and suddenly the cylinder was whirling around him. The fissures tore on upwards and suddenly the whole top half of the cylinder boomed open, the stresses in the structure building up until the whole cylinder split like a seed pod.

Thaddeus tried to control his movement but he couldn't. He kicked fruitlessly against nothing, and glimpsed surviving storm troopers and tech-guard doing the same. The fires from below went dark as the air rushed out and there was nothing but dark-ness now, the ruins of the cathedral below him and the blackness of s.p.a.ce above. The tide of escaping air carried him upwards and out of the cylinder and, as he span out past the limits of Pharos's arti-ficial gravity field, he saw the damage inflicted on the rest of the cathedral. The fires had burst up into the neighbouring cylinders and flames boiled around the base of the cathedral.

Thousands of years of priceless information was burning together with the menials and adepts trapped inside. Thaddeus saw one or two storm troopers and tech-guard who were suffering the same fate as him, struggling helplessly as they were thrown further and further into s.p.a.ce. Ejected crys-tal debris glittered like shooting stars, streams of bright silver fragments spinning against the black-ness. Bodies and body parts span amongst the debris, broken and helpless.

Thaddeus's mind raced through the situation. He tried to think objectively, like a good inquisitor should when first presented with a problem. His HE suit could survive hard vacuum but the air filters would fail soon without an atmosphere from which to draw oxygen and nitrogen. He had no means of propulsion and nowhere to go even if he could move.

The data-slate was in his pocket. That, at least, was something. With luck, he had completed his objec-tive.

Now he just had to survive.

There was nothing around him now but s.p.a.ce. Pharos was a brightly-lit city-temple behind him, the remnants of the cylinder a darkening ma.s.s of twisted metal. The searing unblinking eye of the dying red star burned to one side, and to the other was just cold vacuum. Thaddeus had seen s.p.a.ce only through viewscreen or portholes, or as the night sky from the safety of a planet's surface. He had never been surrounded by it. For the first time, he realised just howdelicate the Imperium truly was - an infinitely thin layer of tenacious life cling-ing to the dead rock that made up a minuscule fraction of the galaxy. No wonder mankind had to fight. No wonder it saw extinction around every cor-ner.

The Soul Drinkers were out there somewhere, between those stars. Thaddeus might even now have the information he needed to find them, but he was cruelly aware of just how close his death was. An inquisitor was not afraid of death, but he was afraid - and proud to be afraid - of dying with his service to the Emperor left incomplete. As Thad-deus drifted, that fear grew and grew, until it surrounded him as completely as the uncaring galaxy itself.

EIGHT.

Septiam Torus was a garden world. Its two main continents were covered in temperate gra.s.slands and deep, lush forests. The faint rings around the planet lit up the sky in shimmering rainbows, with sunsets of a million colours. Crystal-clear rivers wound their way through breathtaking country-side and plunged down spectacular waterfalls before joining a great shining ocean teeming with coral reefs. The planet's ecosystem had never evolved far beyond plant life, and so there were no animals to act as predators or scavengers save for the species introduced to pollinate the planet's small crop of soulfire flowers - flocks of birds with green and blue plumage that streaked across the skies like comets.

Soulfire stamens were the source of some of the most potent combat drugs the Imperium issued to its penal legions and more expendable Guard regi-ments, and so Septiam Torus was accorded special status. Its t.i.thes were paid in the soulfire crop alone and the ruling family - descended from the first rogue trader to find the planet and annexe it in the name of the Emperor - was granted perpetual rights over the world.

Septiam Torus remained unsettled and unspoilt apart from its sole city, a sprawl of marble, like a vast colonnaded palace, with a barracks and brig for its private law enforcement regiment and endless tile-roofed streets housing the crop workers.

One day a ship's lifeboat was glimpsed in the upper atmosphere, its distress beacon bleating that it contained a sole occupant severely injured. The pod thudded home into the middle of a field, kick-ing up a plume of purple-black petals. The Septiam Torus Enforcement Division sent a paramedic team to recover the occupant and bring him for treatment to the city. They found a body badly charred but alive, and brought it back to the infirmary in the shadow of the senate house.

For three weeks the infirmary staff tried to coax life from the victim. Eventually they caused their patient - they couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman - to flicker an eyelid in recognition.

At that moment one of Septiam's senators was vis-iting the facility. It was the sort of duty expected of all senators, representing as they did a loose family group expected to outdo one another in service to their world. The senator disliked the infirmary but it was crucial to keeping the crop workers secure and happy on Septiam Torus, and she blandly absorbed the facts and figures the medical staff handed out as she followed them around the wards.

She rounded a corner and saw the charred form of the crash victim, suspended in a wire harness and wrapped in bandages that were yellow and stained even though they had been changed barely an hour earlier. Monitoring equipment blinked and chirped. The perfumed curtains that hung around the patient couldn't mask the faint odour of cooked meat.

'Ah, our visitor.' The senator smiled - ostensibly to show a friendly face to the unfortunate, but really because the seeping raw body was the first interest-ing thing she had seen all day. 'Our stranger. How long before you can tell us who you are? We are much concerned to find out about you and your ship.'

The patient has only just awoken, my lady,' said one of the orderlies. 'We hope for a return to con-sciousness very soon.'

The patient stirred and stared out at the senator with pained, rolling eyes.

Then, as the senator watched, the patient dis-solved, bandages unravelling as skin sloughed off, looping entrails slithering and hissing to the polished floor, organs bubbling away into a foul brackish pool. The spine came apart and the skull plopped onto the floor, brains liquefying, eyes running down the cheeks, teeth bleached cubes in the stinking mess.

The senator was hurried out of the infirmary and the orderlies hosed the gory mess into the drains. But the senator had breathed in a good lungful of noisome gases from the dissolving patient, and in this way contracted a disease which she then trans-ferred to the senate house at the next meeting.

Within two weeks, the senate and half the popu-lation was wiped out. The tens of thousands of dead were heaped into pits and the beautiful sky of Sep-tiam Torus turned dirty grey with fatty smoke from the pyres.

The survivors tried to set up a sterile zone within the walls of Septiam City but charred skele-tal fingers tore down the barriers and the dead walked again, the perfection of the garden world turned into a bloodstained nightmare of shambling corpses.The few living dead that could speak spoke the name of Teturact.

Guardsman Senshini could swear he heard the crunch of bone beneath the tracks of the Leman Russ Executioner as the tank lurched over a wooded ridge, churning up the cratered mud that stretched across the land where once fragrant fields of soulfire flowers and lush woodlands had thrived. Beyond the main cannon's targeting array Senshini could just pick out the jumble of shapes on the horizon, past the broken lumpy landscape of chewed-up forests and churned mud. Septiam City was dug in against the landscape, pockmarked slabs of marble and log-jams of toppled columns forming huge bar-ricades and rows of tank traps ringing the city's outskirts.

Senshini knew enough about the short history of the conflict on Septiam Torus to guess this was the big push. The first attack on the planet had taken place just a few weeks after Septiam Torus had been confirmed as having been tainted by Teturact. A reg-iment of Elysians had dropped onto the world from Valkyries by grav-chute. They had died almost to the man, finding themselves surrounded by ma.s.ses of walking corpses where they had expected a handful of rebel private troopers. The Elysian Drop Troop regiments were considered elite formations but no amount of training would make a lasgun shot kill something that was already dead, especially when some of those living dead were former comrades.

The Imperial Guard had pulled out those Elysians they could and had sent in a regiment of more con-ventional ground-pounders, the Jouryan XVII. They besieged Septiam City. The Stratix XXIII, hard-bitten hive ganger conscripts itching for a chance to avenge their dead world, had been sent in to sup-port them once it had become clear that the twenty thousand Jouryans couldn't take Septiam City themselves. The governor's own Gathalamorian Artillery were brought in to soften up the entrenched defenders prior to the inevitable a.s.sault.

In total, including the support and supply forma-tions, Army Group Torus numbered just shy of a hundred thousand men.

Senshini, if he were being honest, didn't think it would be enough.

He had been with the Jouryans on Septiam Torus for three weeks. During that time he had heard some of the stories that patrols and kill-sweep teams had brought back. There were dead men out there, walking like the living. Some of them had once been Elysians. Some of them now were Jouryans. At least now the waiting was over, but, like everyone else in the armour section, Senshini feared what they might find inside the city.

He saw foot troops at the edges of his target viewer, figures hurrying past in the dark grey fatigues of the Jouryan XVII, black helmets and body armour already spattered with mud, lasguns held close to their chests.

The armour and infantry were to support one another as they closed in on the perimeter, the tanks breaching the walls and the infantry swarm-ing through the gaps. Demolisher siege tanks were rumbling towards knots of shattered trees where they could scrounge some cover as they opened up at long range.

Leman Russ tanks would close in, their medium-range guns shattering masonry and throwing defenders from the walls. The Execution-ers, of which there were only a handful amongst the Jouryans, would have to venture in further so their guns could fill the breaches with liquid fire before the infantry went in.

The Executioner was armed unlike any other Imperial Guard tank. Its Leman Russ-pattern cha.s.sis was topped with a ma.s.sive plasma blastgun, most of the crew compartment crammed with the hot, thrumming plasma coils that fuelled the gun. An Executioner was a rare beast, hardly ever seen out-side the forge worlds where the Adeptus Mechanicus jealously guarded the secrets of their manufacture, and the Jouryan XVII was fortunate indeed to have acquired any at all. It was Senshini's duty to fire the blastgun, and he knew that it would light up the tank to enemy spotters like a firework display.

Still, it could be worse, thought Senshini as he spotted broken figures moving between the shat-tered columns that broke the jumbled silhouette of the walls. He could be riding a h.e.l.lhound, the notorious and often ill-fated flamethrower tanks with external tanks full of promethium, which had to go into the teeth of the enemy to support the infantry with waves of fire.

Kaito, the Executioner's commander, swung open the top hatch and hauled himself up so he could see out.

The awful battlefield smell rolled into the tank, cutting through even the electrical stink of the plasma coils - a stench of sickly rotting flesh and the heavy, charred smell of burning bodies.

'Hang left, Tanako!' called Kaito, 'Keep them beside us!'

Senshini, like Kaito, was well aware of the need to keep the infantry close alongside the tank. The Exe-cutioner had no sponson weapons to cover its side arcs, and it needed supporting infantry to minimise the chance of a lascannon or krak missile punching through the side armour.

Tanako, in the cramped driver's compartment below Senshini, swung the steering levers and the tankswerved to the left - Senshini could see through the targeter as the tank crept closer to the hunched Jouryans hurrying over the cratered mud.

Kaito dropped back into the tank and pulled the hatch down. 'Artillery's coming over.' he said. Sen-shini saw that already the tank commander's face was streaked with engine grime and the shoulders of his officer's greatcoat were spattered with kicked-up mud. Kaito was a veteran who had lost his previous tank, a Vanquisher tank hunter, to enemy fire on Salshan Anterior and had only taken over the Executioner a week before. To both Senshini and Tanako, the man was a mystery - quiet and reserved, rarely speaking without reason, with a calm face that showed little sign of having wit-nessed the fiercest action on Salshan Anterior.

Even with the hatch down Senshini could hear the first salvoes of the artillery attack shrieking overhead.

The Gathalamorians' guns fired heavy, armour-cracking sh.e.l.ls to shatter the walls, and high explosive rounds to wreak havoc in the city behind them. Senshini watched them as they hurtled over the advancing Jouryan line like falling constellations. The first of them hit home a split second later. He felt their impact through the lurching hull of the tank as they detonated with a sound like an earthquake, a dozen sh.e.l.ls ripping into Septiam City, lighting up the walls and throwing the makeshift defences into harsh silhouettes against the flame.

Manticore artillery tanks to the rear of the Jouryans' armour added bright streaks of rockets, like claw marks against the dark sky, and one of the Gathalamorians' Deathstrike launchers sent a fat missile thudding into the city just beyond the wall where it erupted into a blue-white ball of nuclear flame.

Answering fire spattered back from the walls, a dusting of glitter that was distant small arms fire, autoweapons and lasguns.

'Squadron Twelve is giving us a ranging shot.' said Kaito through the tank's intercom, his voice punc-tuated by explosions growing closer.

'Understood, sir.'

Squadron Twelve was a few hundred metres to the left, consisting of two Leman Russ tanks with las-cannon sponsons and a Vanquisher tank hunter; the squadron functioning as a nugget of anti-armour firepower in the infantry line.

Senshini swivelled the targeter to get a view of Squadron Six's Vanquisher tank firing a tracer sh.e.l.l towards the walls. It fell just short of the walls in a crimson starburst.

'Squadron Twelve, this is Squadron Six gunner.' said Senshini into the tank's primitive field vox unit. We got that. Make it three hundred metres to blastgun range.'

'Squadron Six, this is Squadron Command.' came the voice of the artillery's command section, mounted in a Salamander command vehicle a few hundred metres back. 'You have the short range, move forward for combined long range firing.'

'Yes, sir. Squadron Six out.' Kaito flicked off the vox. 'Get us closer, Tanako. We need to get into range the same time as the Vanquishers.'

'Let's just hope some of those footsloggers follow us up.' said Tanako bleakly as he gunned the Execu-tioner's engines and accelerated.