"Please get up, ma'am," said Shivara. "Something unexpected has happened. The Crimson Fists have come to the city."

Maia sat bolt upright in her bed, dark hair tumbling down over her pale shoulders, a great smile spreading across her face. "They have? This is wonderful. Dare I hope the Chapter Master himself is among them?"

Shivara frowned.

"What is the matter with you?" asked Maia, confused. "Their presence bothers you?"

"Greatly, ma'am."

Maia was getting angry now. Her smile fell away. "I think you had better explain yourself. The sons of the Emperor Himself are here. I cannot understand your mood."

She threw off her sheets, swung her legs over the side for the four-poster bed, slid her feet into fine white slippers, stood and stretched her lean form.

Her eyes went automatically, as they did every morning, to the great statue in the south-west corner of the room. It was cut from the purest white marble on the planet. Amelia's Adonis in Death. A masterpiece. If the Secretary of the Treasury knew how much Maia had appropriated from the palace funds for its purchase, there would be hell to pay. But she had been unable to resist when the sculptor, Ianous Amelia, had finally offered it for sale. Blackmailing the old man had been a difficult and lengthy process, but ultimately worth it.

Shivara's gaze followed that of her mistress.

The figure, Adonis, was as big as an Astartes, and there was something about the face, some subtle nuance of expression or bone structure, that reminded Maia daily of the Chapter Master, Pedro Kantor.

"What bothers me, ma'am," said Shivara, cutting across Maia's thoughts, "is their numbers. They are here in company strength at least." She hesitated a beat. "Word from the spaceport has it that they have come prepared for war."

Maia tore her gaze from the statue's broad sculpted shoulders. "For war?" she said. "Don't be preposterous. There hasn't been a war on Rynn's World for..."

"One thousand two hundred and sixty-four years, ma'am," said Shivara heavily. "Meaning one is long overdue."

NINE.

New Rynn City, Rynnland Province Sergeant Huron Grimm could tell that his superior was in a dark mood, or rather, a darker mood than usual. Captain Alvez rode in the left side cupola of the Land Raider, Aegis Eternis, refusing even to glance at the cheering crowds which lined either side of Carriageway 19. Grimm knew this because, as befit the captain's second-in-command, he rode in the vehicle's right cupola, a position of no small honour. He was a veteran sergeant, a long-serving squad leader who had proven himself in battle a great many times. When Brother Romnus had been killed in action three years ago, Alvez had chosen Grimm as his new right-hand man, elevating him to the 2nd Company's command squad, a decision generally well met by the rest of the company.

Aiding the captain directly was a duty that Grimm relished, though the relationship between the two Space Marines remained strained at best. Their personalities were anything but similar. Grimm would do whatever his commander asked, naturally, but he found the tall Alvez to be a cold, self-isolating individual. Perhaps it had not always been so. It had occurred to Grimm more than once that Alvez might simply have lost too many good friends along the way. Such a hardening of the soul was not unknown among Astartes who outlived many of the brothers with whom they had started service.

Grimm had passed the Chapter's selection trials one hundred and three years ago. He had earned veteran status, and the honour of painting his right gauntlet red, relatively early in his career, successfully leading a squad of ten men against a push by traitor armour units on Edinae-6. Few brothers survived to serve two whole centuries: he knew, and from these the captains were drawn. They were the truly exceptional ones: Alvez, Cortez, Kadena, Acastus and the like, not to mention the Chapter Master himself.

Unlike Alvez, who clearly found the public's adulation irritating in the extreme, Grimm accepted it. He allowed himself to feel the warmth that flowed from those smiles and tear-streaked faces. They were like children, these people; their experiences limited to shorter lives, their bodies limited by their relative fragility. Despite this, the Imperium was nothing without them. What did it stand for if not their continued survival? It was why the Emperor had made his Space Marines at all.

Young and old, the citizens of the Rynnite capital gazed up at him, waving and crying out as Aegis Eternis rumbled past, wide treads grinding the rockcrete surface of the wide lanes.

"Hail the Crimson Fists! Hail the protectors!"

Women on both sides of the road, weeping openly, barely held back by the cordon of struggling Rynnsguard troopers, threw great armfuls of red and blue flowers in front of the column. The sweet floral scent was strong on the air, but it quickly became mixed with the promethium fumes from the armoured vehicles' rumbling exhausts, and became altogether less pleasant.

A waste, thought Grimm, to spend hard-earned money on flowers, only to see them crushed beneath the treads of a tank. It would keep the flower-sellers in liquor for a while, he supposed.

Behind Aegis Eternis, the train of armoured vehicles stretched out, each painted in the blue of the Chapter, each proudly bearing the icon of a red fist in black circle. Their thunderous passage shook ornaments from sills and mantles as far as a kilometre away. Long cracks appeared in the windows and walls of the shining, white-painted hab-stacks. The people didn't notice. They might grumble later, but a force like this hadn't visited the capital in decades. It was a spectacle no one wanted to miss. The bars and inns would be filled with stories for years to come: I was there when they rode through the city.

I saw their captain in the flesh, I did.

Then, the stories would be embellished over time: The great captain singled me out and waved to me, I swear it.

One of them asked me my name!

Why not? thought Grimm. Why should warriors not be venerated a little now and then? The fighting men of the Imperium dedicated their lives to war in the name of the Emperor. They brought peace to others with their sacrifice. So it was with the Imperial Guard, the Navy, the clandestine but powerful forces of the Holy Inquisition. Even the Ecclesiarchy had its fighters.

Their blood was the coin by which the realm survived. War on the fringes kept the core safe. In such dark, dangerous times at these, with humanity constantly besieged by fiends on every side, people needed heroes to believe in more than ever. Grimm saw the importance of that. Could Captain Alvez not see it, too?

Of course, the Space Marines represented so much more than just a military force. They were the closest living link to the Divine Emperor that these people would see in their lifetimes. All the toil, all the worship, all the coppers they put in the collection plates; the sight of just one Astartes made the legends more real somehow. If the Astartes were real, then the Emperor was, too. And if the Emperor was real, humanity could still dare to hope for its eventual salvation. His Divine Majesty would rise again and crush the myriad foe, and, after so very long, there would at last be peace and security in the galaxy.

Holier men than Huron Grimm called it faith.

Eight decades ago, during a mission to hunt down eldar slave traders on Iaxus III, a young priest, slashed to ribbons and left to die in a burning Imperial church, had coughed out words to this effect as Grimm dragged him to safety. The priest hadn't lasted long, his wounds flowing copiously, but Grimm had never forgotten the zeal in the dying man's eyes.

He had been humbled by it. Even a Space Marine could still learn valuable lessons from ordinary men, he knew.

Looking down from the cupola, his gaze passed over a gaggle of well-dressed children practically screaming with delight as the ground beneath their feet shuddered and shook. Others waved frantically from the shoulders of their fathers, desperate to be acknowledged by the armoured giants they recognised from their storybooks and history lessons. Some, particularly the youngest, were terrified beyond words. Grimm saw a good many take refuge in the fabric of their mothers' skirts, leaving little smears of nasal mucus there.

A tiny malnourished girl, her orange rags marking her as an orphan from one of the city's many workhouses, gazed up at Grimm with wide blue eyes. She didn't scream, or shout. Neither did she smile or even cry. She simply gave him the smallest and shyest of waves. Grimm raised his own gauntleted hand just a fraction and returned the greeting.

Without taking his eyes from the road straight ahead, Captain Alvez barked, "Don't encourage them."

Nothing escaped his notice.

"My apologies, lord," said Grimm.

Alvez grunted. "I don't care if the twelve lords of Terra are down there. Acknowledge no one. We are not here to entertain these fools."

"As you say, of course."

"And they are fools, Huron," Alvez went on. "Just look at them. So blindly, happily ignorant. Not one of them, not a single blasted one, judging by the gormless smiles on their faces, has stopped for a second to question why we are here. None have considered for even a moment that the presence of so many Space Marines must surely presage some terrible danger. Dorn alone knows what they think we are doing here."

Grimm couldn't argue with that.

They will think of it, sooner or later, he thought. And then we'll have a panic on our hands.

Two hundred million people on this world. Two hundred million lives in the balance. He'd seen what the orks did to the helpless. He'd seen the horrors they perpetrated.

Thinking of this, he turned his eyes to look for the workhouse orphan again, but someone had shoved her to the rear and she had disappeared behind a dense forest of adult legs.

An image appeared in his mind, and his brow furrowed in furious denial. He gritted his teeth. In the image, he saw the girl looking at him again, but her blue eyes were lifeless. Her blonde hair burned as he watched. He saw her flesh crisping and realised she had been spitted. She was being cooked over an open fire. He saw a massive ork, a black-skinned warboss of prodigious size, pull the spit from the flames and sink his tusks into the meat, devouring her as if she were little more than an snack.

It was no idle daydream. Grimm had seen the evidence of such abominable crimes all too often on other ork-blighted worlds.

"In Dorn's name," he growled quietly, "not here. Not while I draw breath."

Despite the roar of the Land Raider's engine and the rattle of its wide treads, the captain had heard him.

"You wish to say something, Huron?"

Grimm shook his head.

"Not really, my lord," he replied, but, after a heartbeat, he added, "Only that, if the Waaagh does come to Rynn's World, I swear I will turn the Adacian red with ork blood!"

The captain absorbed this comment without turning his eyes from the road ahead. The armoured column was approaching the Ocaro Gate now, its white stone towers rising tall and proud against the deepening blue sky of mid-morning. Beyond the gate lay Zona 6 Industria, the only manufacturing zone though which the Crimson Fist convoy would have to travel to reach the Cassar. There would be fewer people on the streets there. The industrial zones were for working in, not living. Not unless you wanted to die young, riddled with toxins and disease.

"The Waaagh will come, Huron," said Alvez as the massive Ocaro Gate groaned open to admit them. "When it does, know that you and I will turn the seas red together."

TEN.

Rooftop of the Great Keep, Arx Tyrannus Kantor gazed out over a sea of cloud through which the black peaks of the surrounding mountains rose like claws. The sky above was deep azure, just like his armour, and the sibling suns were bright, but they were not warm. Up here, on the roof of the fortress-monastery's tallest structure, it never truly got warm. The technical crews servicing the anti-air batteries at each of the rooftop's corners wore their thickest raumas-wool robes. Even so clothed, they could not work up here for long. The air was so thin that they required rebreather masks or they would pass out and eventually die.

The thin air did not bother the Chapter Master, of course. Nor did it bother the captain at his side, Selig Torres of 5th Company. The two Astartes could endure long periods up here with little discomfort.

Ordinator Savales had been unable to persuade Torres to await the Chapter Master below, but Kantor didn't mind. Here above the clouds, with the freezing wind buffeting you, was as good a place as any to talk about the darkness that approached this world. Torres had sought him out because he was in opposition to the way the Chapter Master was handling the threat of the Waaagh. He had made his stance clear at the last session. Now he stood in silence at Kantor's shoulder, unsure of how to begin. That was unlike him. Kantor had known the acerbic, outspoken captain for over a century, and knew well enough when he had a point to make.

"Best speak freely, Selig. Do not change your ways now."

Torres stepped forward and turned, angling himself towards the Chapter Master so that he could look him in the eye. Kantor saw that he was not smiling.

"How sure are we, my lord," said Torres, "that this will all play out as expected?"

Kantor thought about that. The council session late last night had been more heated than any other in his memory. Some of the captains, Torres foremost among them, were calling for more forces to be put into space to be used as boarding parties. What was the point of keeping the Crimson Fists on the ground, they argued, if the orks would have to fight their way past a major blockade first? Surely the best use of the Chapter's warriors was to send them to the very front line where they could assault the ships of the ork leaders and assassinate them?

The oldest and most experienced council members had sided with Kantor. No matter how effective the blockade proved, orks would set foot on Rynn's World. Even with ten times more ships available to the Chapter, the gaps in the defence grid would still measure many thousands of kilometres across. Such was the nature of war in space. The orks would get some of their ships through, and, when those ships landed, they would spill out their savage cargo onto land that hadn't seen such bloodshed in over a millennium. Kantor wasn't about to let the Rynnsguard fight the greenskin ground forces alone.

It was critical that the true strength of the Chapter remain planetside to meet the invader wherever it landed. Any other approach was, in Kantor's eyes at least, foolish to consider, and it bothered him that several of the captains present at the session had argued so vehemently. He could understand their desire for glory well enough. Boarding actions were some of the most intense and dangerous operations a Space Marine would ever face and success brought great honour. But this battle was less about glory and honour than it was about protecting their home. It was about preserving everything the Crimson Fists represented, both to themselves and to their people, in the face of a threat the likes of which few other Chapters had ever known.

"You will have to trust me, Selig," said Kantor. "You know I would not lead our brothers astray. If I tell you we must concentrate our brothers' strengths on a ground-based war, it is because I have considered all the alternatives. The orks must not gain any solid foothold here. Their spores, if left unchecked, will spread on the winds and blight our world for decades to come. By organising our squads into rapid-response units... you heard me last night. I'll not repeat myself."

Torres nodded, but said, "It is not that I doubt you, lord. Your word is law, and I would follow you into the mouth of oblivion, as you surely know. But I cannot shake my grave reservations about this course. It assumes a certain degree of failure from the start."

Kantor nodded, "I am a realist, Selig. Orks will get through. How many, we cannot say, but they will. Even if we committed every last battle-brother to boarding actions, we could not change that. So we will fight on both fronts. The decision is mine, and it has been made."

Torres looked far from satisfied, but he knew well enough when there was no more room to manoeuvre. Changing tack, he asked, "Have the Thunderhawks returned from New Rynn City yet?"

"They will be here soon."

"And our brothers in the Crusade Company? When do you intend to call them back from their advisory missions?"

Kantor looked out over the vista of endless white cloud as he said, "They will be called back as soon as we have first sign of the foe."

He turned his eyes skywards. High above the planet's surface, he knew, the Chapter's ships, along with the System Defence Fleet-an armada of warp-incapable battleships under the auspices of the Imperial Navy-would be slowly shifting into place, forming a battle-line that measured hundreds of thousands of kilometres.

"I still cannot believe it has come to this," said Torres. "To have already lost Ashor Drakken... And to think that the same orks would dare to strike us here, on our own world..."

Kantor winced a little. He, too, still grieved for Drakken. Sooner or later, a successor would have to be named, someone from the Crusade Company, someone worthy of leading the 3rd Company into battle. For now, the survivors of the Krugerport fiasco had been fused with Drigo Alvez's 2nd Company and were stationed with them in the capital, but the situation was far from ideal. The 3rd Company had an identity of its own, and a proud and glorious tradition to maintain. There just hadn't been time to nominate a new captain before the men had been deployed. It would have to wait until after the orks were beaten back.

"Ashor is with us in spirit, Selig. A proper tribute will be commissioned for Monument Hall once there is adequate opportunity. As for the Waaagh penetrating so deep into this sector so quickly, I have been thinking on that myself. I believe Snagrod's forces are prioritising communications relays. It explains why no warning of the Waaagh has come from anywhere else but Badlanding, and yet we know they have overtaken a score of other systems already."

Torres squinted. "You are suggesting, lord, that this Snagrod is employing an isolation strategy prior to launching his attacks?"

"We've seen hints of it from ork warbands before, though never so well executed, I grant you."

Across the Imperium, the vast Munitorum propaganda machine was relentless in presenting the orks as inferior, dull-witted, bestial foes with only the most rudimentary understanding of what it took to win a protracted war. The filthy xenos were driven by instinct, their tiny brains incapable of tactical analysis and response. For the most part, the propaganda was close to the truth. The average ork got by on muscle, resilience and raw savagery-little else. But Snagrod was clearly anything but average. He had already proved that. Centuries of fighting the greenskins had taught Kantor not to be hasty in underestimating those that climbed to the rank of warlord. The forty-first millennium had seen increasingly disturbing proof that, out there among the millions of disparate ork tribes, there were increasing numbers of individuals that represented a threat unlike anything the Imperium had faced since the dark days of the Heresy. One need only peruse recent battle-reports from Armageddon, a key Imperial hive-world located in the Segmentum Solar.

In 949.M41, an ork warlord had led an unprecedented Waaagh against Imperial forces on that world. The greenskin leader was called Ghazghkull Mag-Uruk Thraka, and such was his rare ability for strategic thinking that he failed in his conquest by only the narrowest of margins. As further testament to his unusual military intellect, he had even managed to affect a massive greenskin exodus when the tide of battle had irrevocably turned against him.

If Ghazghkull Mag-Uruk Thraka was capable of effective strategy, then the Arch-Arsonist of Charadon was, too. Snagrod was employing lighting-quick surprise assaults on every deep-space communications relay he came across. Then, and only then, did he send his forces in en masse to slaughter and pillage the isolated worlds.

But he would not do that on Rynn's World. Kantor would not let him. Snagrod had made a great mistake in his choice of target, and another in announcing his intentions so overtly. The orks were coming in force, and their leader wanted the Crimson Fists to be ready. He wanted a fight he could consider worthy, a fight that would make him a legend, a fight that would bring greenskin tribes from all over the galaxy under one banner. If the beast succeeded in that, the Waaagh would be unstoppable.

Kantor realised that Torres was staring at him, face twisted in concern.

"I have never seen you like this, lord. Never so... dour."

Kantor did not insult his brother's intelligence by affecting a false demeanour. Torres deserved more than that, and deception was not Kantor's way. Lies rarely served honour. "We must not under-"

A hiss of static on the comm-link cut him off mid-sentence. Kantor pressed a finger to the bead in his ear and said, "Monitor."

The voice on the other end was unusually frantic.

Kantor's eyes went wide as he listened.

"Impossible," he growled. "Check your instruments. There must be some mistake."

A moment later, he added, "Then tell him to check his instruments, damn it!"

As Kantor continued to listen to the Monitor speak, he locked eyes with Torres.

When the message ended, he lowered his hand from his ear and muttered, "Dorn's blood!"

"My lord?"

Kantor gripped Torres' armoured shoulder. "The orks, Selig. The Waaagh! It's here. They're already in-system!"

Torres shook his head. "Impossible, lord. They can't be. How far out are they? Forty hours? Fifty?"

"That's the worst of it," said Kantor through gritted teeth. "Three."