Morlocks joined him at either shoulder, their Cataphractii war-plate touching, pauldron to pauldron.

The wraith-like warriors broke against the implacable black wall of ceramite confronting them. Some fought and made small gains, and Santar would remember those who died later, but united the Terminators could not be denied. They rolled over the eldar elite in an unyielding wave. Caught between an energy shield that only allowed them out and the advancing legionaries, there was nowhere for the aliens to run and they were crushed underfoot.

The eldar behind them answered with heavy, relentless fire from their gun platforms.

Cannon impacts smashed into the Morlocks. A Terminator, it might have been Kador, was put on his back. Another, Santar couldn't tell who, was speared through the chest and fell. The rest kept moving, weathering the barrage.

'A light shower,' said Desaan, barely audible above the storm.

'We have less than a minute, brother,' Santar told him.

'More than enough, first captain.'

Bullying their way forwards, the Morlocks reached the crackling edge of the shield.

The eldar inside fell back, but kept up their fusillade of fire. Overhead, Ruuman's cannons and the tanks of the Army divisions pounded.

Something else lurked behind the flicker-haze too, eldar clad in robes and wielding arcane staves.

'Tear it down!' roared Santar, warring with the ionised throb of the energy shield. 'Hit it with everything you've got.'

Thunder hammers and power-mauls, eviscerators and combi-bolters at point-blank range rattled against a field of glowing azure. Rippling violently, the shield bowed but did not break.

The chrono in the retinal displays of all the Iron Hands veterans reached zero.

Its terminus presaged a series of deep, subterranean detonations that split the surface open inside the shield as the mole mortar shells burrowing below exploded in a chain. Concussive bursts billowed upwards as the web the eldar had woven around the node was unpicked.

Flickering initially as a cluster of minute interrupts stuttered across its curvature, the shield flared once and then failed.

Santar was first across its threshold.

'At them! Glory to the Gorgon!'

Reaping into the gun platforms, the Morlocks barely noticed the brutal ordnance from the tank divisions as it hammered the node. Even without the shield to protect it, the bone edifice was resilient, but cracks began to appear along its length.

It was a massacre, efficient not bloodthirsty, but slaughter all the same.

A warrior with a crackling falchion emerged from the melee. Santar met it with his lightning claws, but felt a tightening in the servos of his bionic arm as he applied the killing stroke. His follow-up was slower too, as if pushing against inertia or the effects of high gravity. His legs were the same.

He recalled the robed figures. A cohort of heavily armed alien warriors surrounded them.

'Desaan, can you still see?' Santar asked. Foes were coming at them from every angle, swinging pikes and blades, a rabble of carapace-armoured eldar soldiers and the cloaked ranger caste the Iron Hands had fought earlier. One of them thrust an energy spear at Santar, which he barely turned aside. Seizing the haft, he pulled the warrior towards him and bludgeoned open its faceplate with his fist. The body sagged and was still, but the eldar had left a score mark down the first captain's flank.

'Too close.'

Another aimed a shuriken lance at his torso and blasted apart a section of armour plate. Santar swept his claw around to despatch it but felt the same drag that had slowed him a few seconds before.

Recognising these sensations, he shouted, 'Desaan, your eyes?'

'My sight... is failing.'

Darkness was boiling around the node, coiling from its tip in a thunderhead.

Santar arched his neck to see a black cloud creeping down the side of the node and billowing towards them.

'Throne of Earth...'

Not again...

Santar knew the carnage the storm and its curse of iron could inflict. Upon so many warriors conjoined with the machine, he dared not contemplate exactly how much.

To his mind, there was little choice.

'Hold advance, all companies.'

Santar was caught, seized by indecision just as his bionics were frozen by the approaching darkness.

'We must move forward,' Captain Attar voiced down the feed. 'First captain, what are your orders?'

Taking advantage of the respite, the robed conclave of eldar was already re-establishing parts of the shield. It grew like an organic energy web behind the Morlocks. Shells and las-bursts from the heavy divisions caromed off the rapidly regenerating veil.

Desaan gripped Santar's shoulder guard. 'We cannot stay here, Gabriel. Forward or back, which is it?'

If they stayed, they could destroy the node, or at least slay the witches that had refashioned the shield, but they risked annihilation at their own hands or the hands of their brothers if they did.

Tendrils of cloud, outriders of the dark veil, closed to within a few metres of the Iron Hands. They writhed like vipers.

So close...

'You saw what it did to us in the desert basin.' Santar had made his decision. It tasted bitter as his mouth formed the words.

'Fall back!'

The retreat was slow and wearisome. Legionaries fought the mechanised parts of their bodies, and tried to stop outright rebellion. Some failed and had to be dragged by their battle-brothers. None at least were devoured by the storm, for to be lost to it was a death sentence.

It boiled at the edge of the shield, shrouding what was left of the eldar inside, but reached no farther.

Even from a distance Santar could feel the pull of the machine curse's influence. Absently, his armoured fingers touched the gouges at his neck. The gorget had barely saved his life. He could still feel the prickling heat of his own lightning claw upon his skin, its electric stink in his nostrils.

'So, what is our next recourse?' Desaan had removed his visor and was standing beside the first captain, the two of them in close concert. Desaan's scarred face was worse beneath the metal band he usually wore around his eyes; the skin swollen and ravaged. He reattached the visor to a pair of cranial implants in his temples and the device whirred back to life.

'Functioning perfectly,' he said, muttering rites of activation and purity.

'So long as we stay out of the cloud,' said Santar.

The tempest rippled and undulated like a dark ocean, slowly and mockingly for all its seeming innocuousness.

Santar stared at it. He was standing in a half-circle with his captains and their seconds, while the rest of the Legion waited farther back with their clan companies and looked on beleaguered.

'The shield was breached and only partly regenerated,' said Captain Attar.

Ruuman's barrage had ceased and the Ironwrought joined them from the high ground where the heavies still waited.

Santar turned to him next. 'What's your assessment, Erasmus?'

'The shield is constructed of kinetic energy but created psychically. Whether the xenos have some form of generator sympathetic to their abilities or another piece of fell alien technology, I can only theorise. As we've seen, it can be breached, but only through excessive force.'

Desaan frowned. 'What about the cloud? How do we breach that?'

Ruuman turned his cold gaze on him. 'Without suffering machine-death, we cannot.'

'You think they can keep this up indefinitely?' asked Captain Meduson.

Desaan stared into the darkness, but could find no gap or weakness. 'If our Ironwrought is right, while the storm persists there is no way for us to advance.'

Santar's knuckles cracked with cybernetic resonance.

'I would very much like to summon the Fist of Iron and bombard this site from existence.'

'Then do it, first captain,' said Meduson. 'We can further withdraw our forces and take the necessary cover in the deeper desert.'

Ruuman shook his head. 'Negative. The sensoria are unable to overcome whatever psychic baffles the eldar have in place. We are more likely to exterminate ourselves than level the node.'

Desaan rubbed at his chin and frowned.

'The shield is broken, but not down. The aliens' defences are severely weakened. If we can get warriors behind the veil to kill whatever is creating it'

Henricos stepped up, interrupting.

'I can get beyond that veil.'

Desaan scowled. 'You have a talent for intrusion, brother-sergeant.'

A nod sufficed as apology from Henricos.

Santar's eyes narrowed. 'I am listening. How can you enter the storm, brother? Unless you want to end up impaled on your own sword?'

'Because a warrior of flesh has nothing to fear from it.'

Henricos revealed the stump where he had detached his bionic hand.

'It is safe,' he said quickly. 'I can fight without it.'

A host of hard, reproachful glances fell upon the sergeant.

'You dishonour the Iron Creed,' said Santar. 'That mechanised implant is part of rite and ritual. It is what makes us what we are.'

'And what we are is confounding us, first captain. I am suggesting a different approach.'

'One for which you'll be severely reprimanded.'

'I'll bear whatever punishment is deemed fit.'

Santar glared, fighting the urge to mete out that punishment immediately.

'Even if it is death?'

Henricos was stoic. 'I can breach the veil.'

'Alone?' Attar sounded dubious.

'No, not alone,' Santar answered as he saw a unit of Army veterans approaching the conclave of Iron Hands officers. They looked on edge to be in the presence of the hulking warriors and kept together.

Santar fought down his disdain and tried to see soldiers in the children before him.

Their commanding officer was a hoary-looking colonel of the Savaan Masonites who knelt before the Iron Hands like a serf. Unlike some of his more nervous charges he did not tremble.

Desaan glared at him from the mountainous summit of his Cataphractii war-plate.

'Speak your name.'

'Lords,' said the man, his voice gravelly from smoking too much tabac or simple age. 'I am Marshal Vortt Salazarian of the Savaan 254th, the Masonites, and I have served the Emperor's Great Crusade and your Lord Gorgon for four decades.'

Desaan touched the platinum stud embedded in his skull.

'Do not speak to me of service, old man. What do you know of it?'

Attar folded his immense bionic arms, whilst Meduson merely glowered. They each carried platinum studs and had each fought longer campaigns than most men had lifetimes.

To his credit, Colonel Salazarian didn't blink. Not once.

'I meant no offence. We will accompany Sergeant Henricos into the storm,' he said, licking his lips to moisten his dry mouth. The presence of Space Marines tended to have that effect on humans. 'If you will allow us to, we will do that. It would be our honour.'

Desaan scowled. 'Flesh is weak' he said, but Santar raised his hand for silence.

The Army veterans looked thin and feeble, even the grizzled colonel, but so too did the eldar and they had proven formidable.

Slowly shaking his head, Desaan said, 'They will break and we will have lost one of our own into the bargain.'

'Enough,' stated Santar, regarding the kneeling man. He bade him stand. 'I am not a king and you are not my subject. On your feet.'

Nodding at Desaan, Santar asked the colonel, 'Is he right? Will you break?'

Salazarian squared his shoulders and thrust out his jaw. 'Let us show you our worth. We will not break, my lord. We have endured this far.'

'Few mere men can make that claim,' said Henricos.

Santar's eyes were chips of slate when he met his gaze. 'I knew you had an affinity for humans, sergeant. I saw it when you gave your report concerning the Army divisions.' He paused, eyeing first the storm and then the Army veterans.