'I have it.'

'Then take it, brother.'

Xalmagundi flinched as the missile blazed up into the sky and disappeared, before the flash of an unseen explosion ripped through the obscurity like sheet lightning. Within moments the wreck of the carrier fell from the heavens, belching a trail of black smoke and falling debris. The pilot was desperately trying to regain some control but the craft was a smashed ruin it cut through a tall metal chimney before passing over their heads and crashing into the facade of the manufactorum. Its disappearance in the dust-choked distance was swiftly followed by a further explosion, and the sounds of hull shrapnel ringing off the rockcrete walls.

Xalmagundi almost faltered and had to reach out to steady herself. She brought her attention back to the Angel who called himself Sheed Ranko.

'Sergeant,' he said, not taking his glowering optics from the psyker. 'Take two legionnaires and finish off any remaining Sisters.'

The Angel left the wall of shadow with two of his hulking comrades, but Ranko addressed her again. 'Aren't you tired of being hunted?'

'I can take care of myself,' the psyker shot back, savagely.

'Prove it,' Ranko challenged her.

Xalmagundi's lip curled. She turned and looked up at the pinnacle of the Chorona Spire, just beginning to emerge from the great bank of dust.

Her eyes narrowed. Her pupils became stabbing points of darkness.

The derelict spire gave a thundercrack of internal agony. The pinnacle began to shake as a deep rumble built from within the accreted nightmare of the ghostspire's already weakened foundations, and loose chips of stone shook around their feet.

Xalmagundi's jaw became taut with destructive desire.

The pinnacle suddenly disappeared; like an unfortunate underworlder in a sinkhole, the spire dropped down below the haze.

Every living soul within fifty kilometres would have heard the pulverising boom of successive floors and constructs falling in on themselves. The spire was collapsing straight down like a black hole, some irresistible gravitational force was dragging an avalanche of girders, buttresses and crumbling stone downwards through the guts of the structure. As it fell inwards upon itself, the colossal city-spire sent a cloud of dust and debris into the sky. The sound was excruciating: shearing metal, ancient stone cracked asunder; the ear-bleeding roar of the spire's sheer mass crashing down into the hive below.

Xalmagundi stood with the Emperor's Angels as the collapsing agglomeration drove a blizzard of ancient dust and grit down the narrow dragway. Ranko asked for the magnoculars. He brought them up to survey the new mountain of scrap and rubble Xalmagundi had created from the ancient spire, just with the power of her mind.

'My word, it seems you can take care of yourself,' Ranko said to her, obviously impressed. 'Can you also take care of other things for other people, I wonder?'

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time 2/-417.85//SSASan Sabrinus De Sota City Omegon was one amongst many.

The primarch stood in the hustle and bustle of common humanity. Sweaty faces leered, shoulders barged past. Strangers manhandled him in an attempt to get by on the crowded esplanade, but they could not and would not know that they were in the presence of a galactic prince a son of the Emperor, a lord amongst Angels.

He would have cut an imposing figure on the crowded thoroughfare. Instead the citizens of De Sota City saw one of their own, a miserable specimen of unimportance: a trademonger or cartelier, presented in hololithic semblance. The amulet field generator concealed upon his person disguised the perfection of his true form, cloaking him in the vague impression of mortal mediocrity.

Casting a casual glance across the teeming esplanade, Omegon spotted several more examples of unexceptional humanity: a slavedrover here, a merchantman's purser there, and a trafficker keeping a low profile. They were all his Alpha Legionnaires, members of Effrit stealth squad in a similar disguise to his own, with others further up and down the thoroughfare.

It wasn't difficult to blend in. De Sota City was like a swarming emporium, where everything was for sale and everyone was selling something. Some, it seemed, had come to sell their souls, and it was one such individual that had brought Omegon to San Sabrinus.

The esplanade was one of many that served the crowded galleria. Dirty tapestries hung from the buildings like decorative sashes; stained sheet roofing gave the avenue the feeling of being inside a tent, while tattered drapery rippled gently in the breeze. It housed the shabby offices of various off-world brokers, including many illegal and unlicensed operations, but that did not stop hordes of street vendors from choking up the thoroughfare with their wares and constant calling. Omegon had been feigning interest in one such parasite for the last few minutes, offering the gabbling vendor a little local currency to keep him interested, despite the fact that he had no idea what the pitcher was selling the man was draped in small cages and carried a rod and reel of some kind.

Over the vendor's bobbing shoulder and between excitable hands that thrust the tiny cages at Omegon's face for inspection, he spotted their mark moving with self-importance up the thoroughfare was a Mechanicum artisan. His robes were broad, the deep red of the Martian priesthood, and his ample shoulders supported a busy cogitator bank. The illuminated hood hid a fat face that was flesh-plugged with dirty lines and needles. His lips had long since been sewn together, but a vox-unit hung around his almost non-existent neck; from this he would routinely snatch a trailing microvox and place it against one of his many chins.

This was the infamous Volkern Auguramus: Artisan Empyr, and secret Alpha Legion operative.

Keeping him in sight, Omegon tracked the artisan up the esplanade. Very few vendors bothered Auguramus, since he was flanked by four demi-clawed combat servitors. Grabbing the cage vendor by the face and pushing him out of his path, the primarch slipped into the crowd. Omegon watched as two of his disguised legionnaires made a pass through the throng from the opposite direction.

Auguramus stopped outside an off-world broker's office. Omegon walked past as his quarry looked furtively about before entering, accompanied by one of his dead-eyed drones.

Taking positions a little way up the esplanade and making rotating passes, the Alpha Legionnaires waited for him to re-emerge. When he eventually did he was in an apparent hurry, his cybernetic thugs clearing a path for him through the throng.

'Effrit Seven the broker,' Omegon said quietly into his vox-bead.

Leaving his subordinate to investigate the artisan's dealings, Omegon and the rest stuck with Auguramus through the lower galleria.

'Looks like he's heading for the starport.' That was Effrit Two. 'We're going to have to take him soon. It's all gallerias from here on in. Very public.'

'Effrit Seven,' Omegon said in a low voice. 'What have you got?'

'A consignment for twenty thousand decatonnes of stone from a dead-world quarry in the Beta Ghastri system, to be transported by talon brig to Parabellus. That's Quall sub-sector.'

'What kind of stone?' Omegon asked surreptitiously.

'Serebite. Inert feldsparic silica. Sparse and precious, according to the consignment slate. A lot of coin must have changed hands.'

Omegon recognised the name and, by extension, its purpose.

'Let's take him,' Omegon announced over an open channel.

Auguramus continued his determined march, his clawed servitors never leaving his side, always maintaining the same equidistant four-point configuration around him. Omegon's legionnaires began to make increasingly regular passes, with the primarch himself maintaining a deliberately less than artful tail. Before long the artisan started to notice the same faces in the crowd. His gaze began to dart around as he scanned the masses for suspicious activity he doubled as an operative for the Alpha Legion, and so understood the dynamics and principle of a tail. What Auguramus didn't understand was that in this case his Alpha Legion tail was making its presence painfully obvious.

As the artisan hurried across the galleria, Omegon initiated the second stage of the operation: Alpha Legionnaires in their amulet-field disguises began making crossing passes at the target. Auguramus had the measure of those following him now and recognised many of their faces, but by moving across the galleria to avoid them against the flow of the multitude, his servitors soon found it difficult to clear their master's path.

As members of Effrit approached each other in the crowd, the legionnaires brushed shoulders and exchanged their hololithic semblances. With their amulets changing hands in choreographed patterns, it would be far more difficult for the mark to keep track of his pursuers.

Auguramus stared into the crowds, probably on the lookout for assassins or grab-teams. His eyes routinely returned to Omegon, who was maintaining a steady pace and swiftly convincing the man that he was about to be intercepted.

'We have a boulemart coming up,' Effrit Four hissed over the open channel.

'Move in,' Omegon said. This time he was not careful about how he spoke, and Auguramus who had been peering above the heads of the crowd at him saw the stranger's lips give the order.

Panicked, the artisan moved with his servitor guard over to the side of the galleria. Omegon watched him sidle over to the boulemarts leading off the main esplanade, and felt his prey's temptation to run building into irresistible paranoia.

Four members of Effrit closed in on Auguramus from different directions, in plain sight, but Omegon saw the surprise evident on the artisan's face as one by one his pursuers disappeared. Each one had inexplicably vanished in the crowd.

Spinning around, Auguramus's surprise was replaced by horror as he found himself alone. His servitors were no longer there to protect him.

In their place were the four strangers who had been approaching, now staring silently. Auguramus cast about for any chance of escape. He found only more faces that he had come to recognise in the crowd, and Omegon swiftly bringing up the rear. It was too much for the poor man.

'Stay away from me!' he blurted before bolting for the boulemart a narrow arcade lined with stalls and porch bazaars. Omegon watched him blunder straight through a rag curtain and past a handful of bewildered onlookers.

The servitors stood, silently obeying their master's last command. Omegon had simply arranged for the closing legionnaires to plant their field generators on the bodyguards as they passed, before disappearing back into the multitude. Auguramus believed that they had abandoned him and had been replaced by members of a grab-team when, unwittingly, he had dismissed and mindlocked them.

Tearing aside the curtain, Omegon found two disguised Effrit squad members holding the artisan in a porchway. They stood either side of the heavyset man, their short blades nestling in his folds of neckflesh, and one also held the microvox to Auguramus's throat.

Omegon approached with predatory composure. Auguramus instantly recognised him as the shadow that had been following him through the mercantile world masses.

'You're making a big mistake,' he yelled at Omegon. 'I have influence with the feared and the powerful. You couldn't even imagine...'

Omegon took the field generator from his belt and dialled down through the hololithic frequencies. The image of a De Sotan nobody shimmered and warped until it finally fizzled away to the reality it concealed an armed Alpha Legionnaire, the Legion insignia upon his chest. The other two warriors did the same.

Auguramus stared wide-eyed at his sponsors. He had no words or pleas for such a turn of events.

'Oh, I think I might be able to imagine, Artisan Empyr,' Omegon said. 'I too have influence with the feared and the powerful. They trust you with their secrets: they wish to know why you are trading them with the rest of the Imperium.'

Auguramus found it difficult to catch his breath. Omegon's reveal had been shocking enough, but he struggled to speak with two blades resting at his throat like a pair of shears.

'I'm not... selling anything...' Auguramus managed.

'I know, Artisan Empyr,' Omegon told him. 'You're buying. And you're doing what you do best you are building. Except you're not building for us. You're building for yourself.'

'Did Master Echion send you?'

'Master Echion had his suspicions, but no.'

'What do you want?' Auguramus gasped.

'I want you to restrict your talents to the wishes of your sponsors.'

'But the technology is... remarkable. Potentially even superior to the devices on Perditus.'

'I know,' Omegon replied. 'It was I who supplied you with the specifications and the original materials.'

'It is clearly xenos in origin. Ancient. Where did you'

'Where I acquire my information is my concern. Now, if you test my patience again with another ill-advised question, I'll take your head from your shoulders and leave your fat carcass dumped in an alley.'

Auguramus restricted his response to a fearful nod.

'You are gifted among even your kind,' the primarch admitted. 'That is why we came to you. That is why we took you into our trust. Do not make the mistake of thinking you were the only prospect. There are others who can still deliver what we need.'

Again, a nod of pale-faced dread.

'Artisan Empyr,' Omegon said, 'why are you building a replica of the Tenebrae Pylon Array on the agri-world of Parabellus?'

'The technology,' Auguramus told him delicately, ' alien though it may be could revolutionise the Imperium. It could secure our astrotelepathic network and the immeteorology of our trade routes.'

'Open your eyes. The galaxy doesn't need revolution,' Omegon told him. 'It suffers a little too much from that already. You're securing the Warmaster's Imperium before he has even won it. I don't care if your intentions were noble an operative of the Alpha Legion cannot expect to betray his masters and live long afterwards.'

'D-d-don't kill me, please...' Auguramus begged. 'I can still be useful...'

Omegon leant in with an ominous intimacy. 'We are the Alpha Legion, Volkern. Whether they know it or not, we always find a use for everyone.'

GAMMA.

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time 2/002.68//OCTTenebrae 9-50 Trojan Asteroid The boarding torpedo Argolid drifted through the void of the Octiss system. Like a bullet through the black, the torpedo sliced through the frozen absence, iInertial velocity maintained, course unwavering.

Octiss was like a forgotten corner of the galaxy. A debris field of rock and ice circled in the silence, begirdling the bright but bleary 66-Zeta Octiss; it was a shattered realm, a sea of cosmic offal in which pockmarked planetoids and lighter-than-air giants scudded.

Inside the Argolid, everything was a frosty darkness. Squad Sigma stood to attention in their boarding cages. Legionnaire Arkan sat strapped into the pilot's throne in front of a set of rudimentary controls. Omegon stood at the narrow strip of armourglas that could only charitably be described as a viewport. Wiping the rime from the surface, he allowed a brighter shaft of light to cut through the gloom of the torpedo compartment. 66-Zeta Octiss was close, then. Rune banks and decking twinkled and glistened with an icy sheen.

A few hours earlier, Omegon had had Arkan shut down everything with a power signature within the torpedo heat, gravity, life support. The legionnaires were all decked out in full plate and helmets, and had engaged the maglocks on their boots. The Argolid had fired its final burn before going dark and hurtling between the mute fury of two gas giants. The serene deep-ocean green of their smooth surfaces belied the true nature of the planets: unimaginable depth and pressure, winds thousands of kilometres in speed, eternal storms and cyclonic pits, intense radioactive fields and a comet-trap gravitational influence.

Arkan held a simple astrolabe to his helmet optics and made measurements through the cleared section. The shaft of sunlight suddenly disappeared, indicating that something of size had moved between the Argolid and the uncomfortably close Octiss star.

'Well?' Omegon looked to the legionnaire.

'On target, my lord,' Arkan replied. 'As long as we don't hit anything.'

'We cannot afford the attention that a correctional burn might attract,' Omegon told him, but there was little they could do about the fragments of metal and rock spinning serenely through deep space about them.

Before the reinforced nose-cone of the boarding torpedo rolled the stately magnitude of Tenebrae 9-50. Like a mountain range plummeting through the void at colossal speed, the asteroid was rugged and irregular, scarred by craters, impact sites and chasmic fractures. Arkan pointed out a deep cleavage in the asteroid rockface, a natural feature designated as the 61 39' Ecliptic, or colloquially to the base personnel as 'Vacuity's Bosom'. The deep fissure had been chosen as the Alpha Legion's point of entry.

Omegon watched the colossal asteroid tumble towards them, rotating around its bulbous centre of gravity. The primarch was silently impressed with Arkan's calculations. The boarding torpedo was not only closing on their target solely under the power of inertia, but it was being almost effortlessly targeted towards a jagged pit gaping in the asteroid's midriff, all while the gargantuan rock itself slowly spun in the void.

Dropping down through the chasm, the boarding torpedo pierced the silky darkness of the asteroid's interior. Here there was no light at all, not even the pinpricks of distant stars for company. Omegon looked to Arkan he was monitoring a handheld chronometer.

The boarding torpedo was designed to breach the armour of enemy vessels and the amalgamate hull sections of abominate space hulks, but Omegon believed that Tenebrae 9-50 would prove more of a challenge and so had planned for alternative disembarkation protocols. Once again wiping the film of ice from the viewport, he put his faceplate to the surface. Even with his more-than-human eyesight, the primarch could see absolutely nothing.

'Legionnaire' he cautioned, but Arkan's chronometer completed its countdown with a single click.

'Launching counterhook,' Arkan announced, pulling on a pair of pneumatic paddles set in the runebank above. A loud pressure snap reverberated through the torpedo as a harpoon launched from the rear of the craft, trailing an adamantium alloy line. Satisfied that the harpoon had embedded itself deep within the bedrock, Arkan reported: 'Firing grapnels; engaging resistance.'

Rather than tearing the rear out of the torpedo with a dead stop, the legionnaire brought the craft to a disciplined halt through the increasing drag offered by a heavy-duty gear assembly. Omegon could feel the hull trembling, and the assembly began to emit an grinding screech. He put out his arms to steady himself. The boarding torpedo was clearly decelerating but it was difficult to tell in the absolute darkness of the rocky trench whether or not it would be fast enough.

The Argolid suddenly lurched; the counterhook had run its line. The legionnaires were secure in their boarding cages, while Arkan was strapped into the pilot's throne. Omegon was thrown forward, but with his powered gauntlets fixed around the rail the primarch didn't travel far. Yanked back a little on its tether, the torpedo proceeded to float through the darkness, scraping against the irregular wall of the shaft before bumping to rest against the cold rock. Omegon nodded, to the legionnaires and to himself.

'Squad disembark. Vox silence until we reach the airlock.'

Firing the starboard bulkhead, Sergeant Setebos kicked off into the lightless gap. The asteroid had next to no natural gravity and the legionnaire drifted through the blackness, bolter clutched in one gauntlet. He activated his suit lamps with the other.

The halo of light around the sergeant glinted off the bottom of the shaft, showing the Alpha Legionnaires just how close they had come to a terminal impact. Floating one by one in the gloom, Squad Sigma joined him by a narrow cave entrance.

Lead on, sergeant, Omegon signed, prompting Setebos in turn to put Zantine on point. The Legion's battle-signals were a fluid exchange of deft hand movements, delivered and received with ease born from decades of use.

Flipping their own suit lamps on, the squad leapt across the open space in a disciplined column. Snagging outcrops and pillars of rock with ceramite fingertips, the legionnaires pushed off using their legs and coasted across to each new foothold. Zantine held his bolter out in front of him, stabbing the barrel at the receding darkness of branching tunnels and hollows. It was a labyrinth of labyrinths dark, with zagging passages leading off in every direction, including shafts thrusting both up and down into the depths. It was universally rough, rocky and thoroughly unrecognisable.

Zantine swiftly established a general heading and despite deviations demanded by serpentine crawlways, choke points and bottlenecks, he kept Squad Sigma moving with purpose through the asteroid's fractured innards. Legionnaire Vermes brought up the rear, routinely sweeping the muzzle of his bolter across the inky blackness which followed in their wake.