HAMMER.

OF.

DAEMONS.

Ben Counter.

IT IS THE 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the G.o.ds, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carca.s.s writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls arc sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

YET EVEN IN his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican. the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes. the s.p.a.ce Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms arc legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their mult.i.tudes, they arc barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

TO BE A man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most b.l.o.o.d.y regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned.

Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting G.o.ds.

ONE.

THE FLOOR AND walls of the medicae bunker were painted dark green, so the blood just looked like dark water pooling under the beds.

'He's at the back,' said the medicae orderly. Her face was grey with fatigue, but her eyes were alert.

Then let's hurry,' said Colonel Dal'Tharken.

The medicae led the colonel between the rows of beds, each with its wounded man lolling semiconscious with sedation, or grimacing as an orderly bent over his wounds. Some of them managed to nod or even salute to the colonel as he walked by, and he returned their greetings with a moment of eye contact. Most of the conscious ones, though, were focused on the man who followed the colonel. He was huge, and armoured in gunmetal, something the Hathrans had never seen before they had come to this world. Indeed, he was someone very few of them had ever seen up close. He seemed to take up what little room remained in the bunker.

Three came in,' the medicae continued, casting a curious glance at the armoured figure behind the colonel. 'One made it. We had to burn the others.' Her manner was short and efficient, as if all her compa.s.sion had been drained away.

Colonel Dal'Tharken didn't have to ask how the survivor was doing. At the back of the bunker there was a row of beds with mesh insect nets, useless in the arctic climate of Sarthis Majoris, but enough to create a barrier between the recovering and the most severely wounded men, the ones who hadn't realised they were dead, and the sights of suffering around them. The patrol's survivor was going to die, and soon.

'If it matters, he's in no condition to talk,' continued the medicae.

'Is he conscious?'

'In and out.'

'That'll do.'

The medicae pulled back the netting from a bed at the back of the bunker. The smell of burnt meat and hair welled up from the bed.

'a.r.s.e on the Golden Throne,' swore the trooper who lay there. 'I must really be in trouble.'

Trooper Slohane?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Officer present.'

'Sorry, sir. Can't salute.'

Trooper Slohane was missing most of his lower jaw. It had been replaced with a temporary prosthetic that was just mobile enough to allow him to talk. The face on the damaged side was raw meat. A wad of bandage was taped over the ruins of one eye. The jacket of his fatigues had been cut away and a wound swallowed up most of his chest. A transparent slab of gel-skin lay over the wound to staunch the bleeding, but the injury was far too severe for Slohane to be saved. There was so much blood on the floor and soaked into the bed that blood loss would get him even if his organs held out.

Slohane's eye focused on the shape towering over the colonel. For a moment, he didn't seem to focus, as if the figure was too big to fit within the confines of the bunker.

Slohane smiled with what remained of his mouth. 'You. Heh, I never thought I'd actually get to be face to face with one of you: a s.p.a.ce Marine. When... when I was a child I thought you were just a story.'

Justicar Alaric stepped forward. In full power armour he was almost twice the height of a man. His armour was ornate steel adorned with devotional texts picked out in gold, and one ma.s.sive shoulder pad bore the heraldry of a black and red field with a single starburst. The symbol of a book pierced by a silver sword adorned the other shoulder. Alaric wore no helmet, and his face seemed too human for the size and ornamentation of his armour, even with his scars and the service stud in his forehead. He had a halberd in his hand, long enough to sc.r.a.pe the bunker ceiling, and on the back of his other hand was mounted a double-barrelled storm bolter.

'No stories,' said Alaric simply. 'We are here for the same reason you are. This is a world worth saving.'

'What did you see, trooper?' asked the colonel.

Slohane arched back and coughed. The wet ma.s.s of his lungs was visible through the ruin of his chest. 'Six of us went out. The captain said we were heading... heading through the southern route to get to the foothills before nightfall. Avalanche must've come down the day before, because the route was blocked, so we skirted up along Pale Ridge.' Slohane looked at the colonel. 'We should've turned back.'

The medicae picked up a handful of the printout that had spooled out of a monitoring cogitator. She gave the colonel a meaningful glance. The irregular life signs on the printout meant Slohane didn't have long.

'Go on, trooper,' said the colonel.

'Things started... coming out of the ground,' said Slohane. He was looking up at the ceiling. There was too much in his mind's eye to let him focus on anything real. 'Hands, and faces. They started screaming. And there was fire. The captain died. We had to let him go. He was melting into the ground. Tollen went crazy and started shooting. I just ran, sir. I ran away.'

'And then?'

'I was heading up the ridge. I was on fire, I think. These dark things were coming up through the snow. I got to the top of the ridge and kept firing. The d.a.m.n lasgun was red-hot. I ran back along the ridge away from it all. I just looked back once.'

Alaric knelt down beside the colonel, so he was the height of a normal man. 'What did you see?'

Slohane's eye rolled around. Tears welled up. There were millions of them,' he said, 'millions, all standing on the other side of Pale Ridge.'

'Men?' asked Alaric.

'Men,' said Slohane, 'and things. Huge things. Monsters, waiting there like animals on the slaughterman's ramp. Then the clouds blew by and stars came out, and the whole valley was covered in blood. The mountain streams had thawed and they were blood, too.

I could hear them chanting. It wasn't no language like a man might speak. It was words straight from the warp.'

'What about artillery?' asked the colonel. 'Armour?'

'I don't know,' replied Slohane, but there were monsters in the air, too, with wings. And a tower... lit up in red... and him up on the battlements, like a king.'

'Who?' asked Alaric urgently, leaning down so his face was close to Slohane's. 'Who did you see?'

Slohane tried to reply but his words came out as a painful gasp. A tear of blood ran from his remaining eye. The medicae dropped the printout and fiddled with the controls on the monitor.

'He's unconscious,' she said. 'He's losing blood faster than we can pump it in. You won't get any more from him.'

'Pale Ridge,' said Colonel Dal'Tharken. 'Right under our b.l.o.o.d.y noses.'

'We knew it would come to this,' said Alaric'

'That we did.' The colonel turned to the medicae and pointed to Slohane's convulsing body. 'Burn him, too.'

'Of course,' she replied.

ALARIC MET UP with his squad on the fortifications above the medical bunker. The night had been even colder than usual, and cloaks of ice clung to the rockcrete battlements. Wisps of vapour rose from the pillboxes and weapon points, from the breath of the Hathran Guardsmen huddled beneath their greatcoats. The Grey Knights were standing watch at the right of the line, where the medical bunker met the ice wall of the mountainside. The rest of the line stretched across the pa.s.s, manned by the Hathran soldiers who still stole half-fearful glances at the Grey Knights. None of them knew what a Grey Knight was, but they had all heard of the s.p.a.ce Marines, humanity's saviours, the greatest soldiers in the galaxy. A s.p.a.ce Marine was a symbol of the Imperium, a reminder of what they fought for.

'What news, Justicar?' asked Brother Haulvarn as Alaric trudged through the slush of the night's ice-fall.

'It's coming to an end,' replied Alaric.

'Good,' grunted Brother Dvorn. Dvorn, along with Haulvarn, had fought with Alaric since he had first been elevated to the rank of justicar. Where Haulvarn was a born leader, Dvorn was a pure warrior. His nemesis weapon was in the form of a hammer, a rare weapon that perfectly suited Dvorn's brutality. Alaric was glad to have both of them at his side on Sarthis Majoris. If Trooper Slohane's testimony had any truth in it, he would need them soon.

'Do we know what we're facing?' asked Brother Visical. 'Not yet,'

said Alaric.

'Looking forward to finding out,' said Dvorn.

'Don't be too eager,' replied Alaric. 'It's bad. The enemy must have been gathering strength since we made landfall. They're ma.s.sing past Pale Ridge right now. The colonel is mobilising every able-bodied man as we speak. And it'll happen soon. The enemy can't keep a force like that in check for long.'

'Will the line hold?' asked Brother Thane. Thane and Visical had been drafted into Alaric's squad after the losses it had suffered on Chaeroneia.

That's not for me to say,' said Alaric gravely. The Hathrans will decide that. We must show them how the enemy must be resisted, and help lead them in their prayers. After that the battle will fall on them.'

'Not if we get there first,' said Visical with a smirk. While Thane had only recently earned the armour of a Grey Knight, Visical was a veteran. The gauntlets of his power armour were permanently blackened by the flame from his incinerator, in spite of the wargear rites supposed to keep them spotless. 'We'll show them how it's done.'

Dvorn nodded in agreement. Some men just fought like that, Alaric had decided; they simply threw aside all concept of failure and trusted in their training and determination to carry them through. They were, after all, Grey Knights, some of the Imperium's best soldiers, but Alaric could not think that way.

'Thane, lead the prayers,' said Alaric. 'Our bodies are prepared, so ensure that our souls are the same.'

A sound reached Alaric's ears. The voices of the Imperial Guard, low and mournful, rose as one in the death song of Hathran.

FATE HAD SEEN fit to place Sarthis Majoris in the path of the most terrible Chaos incursion since the ancient days of the Horus Heresy.

The Thirteenth Black Crusade had erupted from the warp storm known as the Eye of Terror, led by the greatest champions of the Chaos G.o.ds. The initial campaigns had seen Cadia besieged and whole Imperial armies annihilated as they tried to stem the tide.

Only the sacrifices of the Imperial Navy had kept the Black Crusade from reaching the Seg-mentum Solar itself. The Inquisition had made appalling decisions that not even a hard-bitten Guard general would stomach: bombing Guard regiments into dust for witnessing the predations of the Enemy, sacrificing whole worlds to slow down the Chaos hordes, betraying Emperor-fearing citizens at every turn to buy tiny slivers of hope. The whole galactic north was mobilised to barricade the Imperial heartland against the Black Crusade.

Chaos brought with it daemons. The Ordo Malleus, the most secretive and warlike branch of the Inquisition, had sent unprecedented resources to the Eye of Terror. Whole companies of Grey Knights had been thrown into the cauldron of the Eye. The Eye of Terror drew in the Imperium's daemon hunters, and more often than not it spat them out mutilated, mad or dead. Yet still they fought, because that was what it meant to be human: to fight when any sane man would say the fight could not be won.

Sarthis Majoris supplied fuel to the Imperial Navy. Its refineries turned the radioactive sludge in the planet's mantle into the lifeblood of the Seg-mentum battlefleet. Maybe that was why a fleet of Chaos ships, ancient things shaped like filth encrusted daggers, was diverted to invade Sarthis Majoris. Or perhaps the millions of colonists huddled in the refinery cities were simply too tempting a sacrifice to the Dark G.o.ds. Either way, if Chaos took Sarthis Majoris, the engines of Imperial battleships would fall silent, and dozens more Chaos ships would break through the Imperial blockades.

The Hathran Armoured Cavalry were close enough to be landed on Sarthis Majoris shortly after the Chaos forces made landfall on the southern polar cap. The hurried strategic meetings confirmed that the Chaos army's northwards march would have to take them through the ice-bound pa.s.s in the towering Reliqus Mountains.

Once through the mountains, there was no telling which refinery city would be sacrificed first. So the pa.s.s had to hold, and the Hathran Armoured Cavalry had to hold it.

Imperial commanders requested a.s.sistance from any quarter to help deliver Sarthis Majoris from the enemy. The Ordo Malleus heard these requests and performed astropathic divinations that confirmed the presence of daemons among the hordes landing on the planet. In a perfect galaxy they would have sent armies of s.p.a.ce Marines and storm troopers led by daemon hunters to crush the Chaos forces on the polar cap, but the galaxy was far from perfect, and those legions and inquisitors were spread across a thousand worlds threatened by the Black Crusade.

The Inquisition's contribution to the defence of Sarthis Majoris consisted of Justicar Alaric and four Grey Knights.

TWO.

'MOVEMENT!' CRIED ONE of the sentries. Two kilometres! West face!'

The Hathrans stationed on the wall hurried to their posts, peering into the breaking dawn light. It was running down the sides of the valleys in a thin, greasy film, turning the ice of the peaks far above an angry gold. The depths of the valley sketching southwards were still veiled in the dying night's darkness.

'I see them,' said one of the officers commanding the watch. He pulled magnoculars from his greatcoat and looked through them down the valley. Shapes were moving in the darkness, scrabbling along the side of the mountain. A human couldn't climb like that, especially one almost naked, clad only in its own flayed skin.

'Is it the big one?' asked another Guardsman, a support gunner, leaning forward on the barrel of his fixed autocannon.

'Might be just another sacrifice,' said yet another. Most of the Guardsmen believed that the Chaos attacks, up to that point, had been deliberately mounted to sacrifice cultists and mutants beneath the Imperial guns, to seed the valley with blood and please the Chaos G.o.ds. A few, more prosaically, thought the enemy was just trying to use up the Hathrans' ammunition, but everyone was certain that an attack was coming, after the rumours had spread that a vast Chaos horde, millions strong, was pooling behind Pale Ridge.

'Guns up! Men to your stations!' cried the officer. Sirens sounded as Guardsmen swarmed up onto the battlements. The few who were sleeping jumped from their beds and were still pulling their scarves around their faces as they emerged into the freezing dawn.

Their breath formed heavy clouds rolling between the battlements.

The attacks had come nightly. The enemy had thrown handfuls of men at them. It was simpler to call them men. The officers called them 'cultists', a useful catch-all for the mutated, heretic and insane that made up the bulk of the Chaos army. Their bodies, frozen solid, were dark red smudges below the latest snowfalls. Some of them had been robed madmen who chanted in inhuman tongues. Others were scrabbling things that had presumably been human before their skins were removed and nailed back onto their wet, red bodies in sc.r.a.ps. Some of those had made it onto the walls, and most of the Hathran wounded in the medicae bunker, or in the grim frozen heap of bodies on the fortification's northern side, were the result of those leaping, screaming creatures.

Sometimes red lightning had struck from the heavens, searing men to charred meat. Sometimes soldiers had gone mad and killed their brother soldiers, and no one could tell if it was some sorcery of the enemy or old-fashioned battle psychosis. Many of the patrols sent out to locate the enemy had not returned, or had crawled back burned, mutilated or mad. The enemy wanted the Hathran line bruised and tender, its teeth ground down, its men exhausted and its guns well-worn.

There had been enough petty death. The G.o.ds wanted a spectacle.

'You there!' yelled Colonel DalTharken at the closest officer, as he stormed out of the command bunker. 'Get some men into that firepoint! And get the engineers up on the battle cannon. The d.a.m.n things jam every three rounds.' Guardsmen were scrambling to their posts, including the tanks iced in at the ends of the line. The Hathrans were an armoured regiment but the fuel had frozen in the engines of their Leman Russ battle tanks and those that still worked were dug into the ice to be used as fixed gun points.

'Colonel,' said Alaric as he pushed his way through the soldiers now thronging up onto the battlements. 'Where do you need us?'

'Hold the right,' said the colonel. In truth he had no right to give orders to the Grey Knights, attached as they were to the Inquisition, but protocol was less important here than the battle plan. 'If they get explosives between the medical bunker and the valley wall they can blast a breach. That's what you have to stop.' The colonel's features softened for a second. The man underneath the soldier showed through for a moment. 'Good luck, Justicar,' he said. Colonel Dal'Tharken, alone among the Hathrans, had some understanding of what the Grey Knights really were and why they had been sent to Sarthis Majoris.

'The Emperor is with us,' replied Alaric, and turned to join his men.

The Grey Knights were already in position. The medical bunker on the extreme right of the line was crowned with battlements like the jawbone of a stone-toothed dragon, but it was still the line's weak point. The enemy would pool here, forced wide by the crossfires of Hathran guns, and sooner or later a cultist would throw a demo charge or a bundle of grenades into just the right place to shatter the ice and blast a gap wide enough for men to pour through. Then the line would be surrounded and everyone defending it would die.

Except, the Grey Knights were there. As far as the Hathrans were concerned, nothing could destroy them as long as there were s.p.a.ce Marines still alive to fight.

'It's not another sacrifice,' said Brother Visical. They're holding back.'

'Not for long,' said Alaric. The enemy isn't that patient. They'll hit us here and now.'