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Ingvar broke into the central hub, flanked by Callimachus and Vhorr. For a moment, just a fraction of a second, even his psycho-conditioned senses rebelled.

  The domed roof was broken, neatly breached at the apex. Long chains hung down from a circular hole, each one hauling a struggling body up into the gap. More than a hundred humans were being extracted, all impaled on the chains like fish on a line. Many more victims were waiting at floor-level in improvised pens, all of them bearing signs of recent mutilation. The stench of faecal matter and sweat mingled with toxic aromas from the xenos’ chem-weapons. Blood and filth swilled freely across the floor, the slick studded with floating eyeballs.

  Twenty eldar were corralling the slave-chains, lashing out with barbed whips that sliced chunks of flesh from the shivering victims. Rows of eviscerated corpses hung on hooks from the vaults, their empty rib cages twisting in the thin air, slopping trails of gore to the floor below. The chamber had been turned into a charnel-vision of utter depravity, a slaughterhouse stocked with human meat.

  Ingvar’s hunt-sense kicked in. The three Deathwatch Space Marines opened fire, each picking his target. At the same time, Prion, Xatasch and Leonides burst in from the far side of the hall and did the same, filling the space with the soft whoosh and thud of stealth-shells impacting.

  Taken by surprise, several eldar were downed outright. More were felled as they tried to extract themselves from their torturing, and the numbers rapidly evened.

  Ingvar leapt across a railing and ran into the centre of the hall, firing all the while. He saw Leonides charge towards one of the lead slave-takers, peppering its slender body with round after round until the armour blew apart in flecks of ebony. Callimachus, Vhorr and Prion maintained ranged fire, picking out the eldar with merciless accuracy, while Xatasch moved silently to block the far exit.

  The xenos had been caught, their attention focused on whatever rites they had come to enact. Even with their peerless reactions, it took time to switch from torture instruments and take up their splinter weaponry.

  Ingvar had been told not to use his Fenrisian battle cries on the operation, but as he charged towards them his throat unlocked in a ragged howl of fury. He kept on firing, whirling through the meagre projectile hail that the xenos mustered, smashing his way through the broken seats of the old assembly chamber and towards the nearest enemy. The eldar warrior tried to get a blade up at his throat, but by then Ingvar’s momentum was unstoppable – he crashed into it, punching out with his gauntlet and shattering the creature’s fragile carapace. His fist plunged up into its viscera, and he hoisted it clear from the floor, bellowing death-curses as its foul blood rained down on him.

  ‘Vlka Fenryka!’ he roared, hurling its broken corpse away and sending it slamming into the edge of an overturned torture-slab with satisfaction.

  As he tensed to charge on into the remaining xenos, his helm-display flashed with a single command – flesh-twister – and his head snapped up.

  The haemonculus emerged into the open, ascending from the piled-high bodies at the centre of the hall. It soared high above the bloody floor, its hide-cloak twisting under the buffeting lift of suspensor columns. All six Space Marines immediately opened fire, and its skeletal body was shrouded in explosions.

  That didn’t stop it – bolter-detonations splash-patterned across some kind of energy-field. Ingvar could see an impossibly aged face in snatches within, glaring at them with pure contempt. It made some kind of gesture, and the chains hauling bodies up to the dome’s aperture fell away, coiling down to the floor in clanging spirals.

  The few remaining eldar warriors fought back then, launching splinter-volleys at the Space Marines, but their challenge was no longer significant. Vhorr and Prion filled the chamber with wide-scatter bolter-fire to lock them down while the others pursued the haemonculus.

  Leonides was quickest, firing the whole time as he leapt up to grasp at the xenos’s chain-tails. His gauntlet grasped on to a flailing length of metal, but his whole body immediately spasmed with fork-lightning, and he slammed to the floor, his armour steaming.

  Ingvar ran over to him, scanning for life-signs even as he maintained fire on the haemonculus above. By then, Leonides was already dragging himself back to his feet.

  ‘It’s got some tricks,’ rasped the Blood Angel, hefting his bolter again.

  ‘As do we,’ hissed Xatasch, reaching for a bulbous object at his weapon-belt, one that looked more eldritch and alien than anything else in the chamber. He primed it with a flick, then hurled it at the haemonculus. Before the creature could react, it exploded in a whirl of neon, sending a blast-pattern sheeting out in radial spirals.

  The haemonculus’s energy-field shattered, exploding like glass, and something like a high-pitched wail broke out amid the carnage. It plummeted, thrashing out with prehensile hook-chains even as Xatasch’s arcane weaponry ate through its protective aegis.

  Callimachus was already in position, hefting a claw-shaped weapon that looked to have been carved from ivory. He trained its sights on the haemonculus and opened fire just as the creature crashed back to earth. A flare of eye-burning light enveloped the struggling xenos, enclosing it in what looked like rapidly-solidifying crystal. It cried out words that none of them could understand in a voice that sounded like iron nails being dragged across granite. Then the crystalline lattice entirely engulfed it, ending both its screeching and its movements.

  When the debris of Xatasch’s weapon had subsided, they could see the result – a solid-mass stasis field, with the haemonculus caught in its centre like a wasp in amber. Its outraged scream was frozen on its face, lost amid translucent layers of xenotech.

  Ingvar still hated to see that – witch-weapons, forbidden to all but the servants of the ordo. Bolter and blade should have been enough. There was no time to regret their use, though, for with the capture of the haemonculus the remaining eldar warriors were roused into a frenzy. As if their lives depended on it, they came clawing back into the fight. Reinforcements from the rest of the installation came careering back into the hall through unguarded entrances around its edge, cartwheeling and pirouetting as they fired their deadly armour-cutting ammunition.

  ‘Defensive,’ ordered Callimachus, hefting his bolter again and laying down a fresh wave of fire.

  The Onyx squad members retreated towards the centre of the hall, drawing back to where the haemonculus’s stasis-enclosed body lay on the floor surrounded by stray slivers of electric-discharge. As they ceded ground, those humans still capable of speaking cried out for aid, reaching out with bloody hand stumps and eyeless faces. They knew that the bringers of pain were coming among them again, and what sanity remained in them forced them to cleave to the deliverers that had arrived so suddenly.

  Ingvar hunkered down next to Vhorr, and the two of them launched bolter-round after bolter-round into the enemy. It felt like they’d already killed all the xenos in the installation, but more emerged all the time, spinning into view as if bursting out of the rockcrete itself. Their already balletic fight-style took on a frenzied edge as they weaved and ducked through the hurricane of shells to get at their prize.

  Ingvar watched his ammo-counter tick down to zero, and instinctively reached for his blade. He’d already seen how quickly Callimachus had been outmatched, and relished trying some sword-work out for himself.

  Just a little closer... he thought, watching the nearest xenos dance towards him.

  Then a massive explosion ripped the roof apart in a cloud of shattering metal and armourglass. A heavy, thudding sound followed, growing louder as the debris bounced around them. The xenos were hurled back, knocked from their feet by the downdraft of enormous engines.

  Ingvar didn’t need to look up to know what was descending through the annihilated roof-dome. A second later, heavy bolter-fire opened up, carving through the surviving xenos and blasting their fragile outlines into explosive clots of blood and armour-shards.
The whole chamber drummed with the rubble of the Thunderhawk’s descent, stirred up by the hurricane of the gunship’s arrival.

  ‘So, you have something for me?’ came Jocelyn’s sardonic voice over the squad-comm.

  ‘Open it up,’ snapped Callimachus, backing towards the haemonculus’s cocoon.

  Only then did Ingvar look up. The ink-black outline of the Shade hung less than ten metres above them, filling a large chunk of the assembly hall’s broken dome and labouring on atmospheric thrusters. Like all Deathwatch-issue craft, it was kitted out with bulky archaeotech artefacts along its flanks, and the only insignia was the deathshead sigil of the Ordo Xenos. Its sponson-mounted heavy bolters juddered on full-power, ripping apart any surviving eldar careless enough to keep moving. As the guns swept the hall, the far walls were lost in blooms of dust and blown masonry.

  The gunship dropped down further, and with a screech of metal on metal the fore crew-bay door swung down, revealing an illuminated interior lined with esoteric field-amplifiers. An open casket lay within, twice the height of a man, connected by lengths of cable to the hull.

  Once the gunship was hovering two metres up, Callimachus and Leonides leapt into the crew-bay, boosted by their armour-servos. Lengths of adamantium chains clattered down, fastened to the haemonculus’s stasis-cocoon by Xatasch and Prion. Ingvar and Vhorr kept up the punishing barrage of shells until their ammo-counters finally clicked empty.

  ‘We leave,’ voxed Callimachus from the gunship’s interior.

  The haemonculus was hoisted into the crew-bay and secured within the casket. Working quickly and expertly, Leonides fastened a series of probes to the exterior of the crystal, and lights began to flicker along the edge of the instruments. By then the others had hoisted themselves up into the gunship’s interior.

  Ingvar was the last to leave. He looked around the hall for a final time, his attention snagged by the scene of complete destruction. The remnants of the old Imperial architecture slumped amid the pools of blood left by the torturers. Hooks and eviscerators swung from what remained of the ceiling-arch, glistening from the gobbets of flesh still attached.

  ‘Space Wolf,’ growled Callimachus.

  Ingvar pulled himself over the edge of the crew-bay door and away from the gore-swilled floor. As he did so, the hatch-pistons hissed and pulled tight, closing off his view. Shade powered up its thrusters, and lurched towards the broken-tooth edge of what had been the hall’s roof.

  By the time Ingvar had clambered up into Shade’s cockpit, the Thunderhawk was high above the installation. From the nearside real-view portal he could see the sprawling structure clinging to the obsidian surface of the asteroid. There was very little sign of damage, save for the shattered dome of the assembly hall. The far vaster ore-workings were entirely intact, and the gunship’s sensors reported the full functioning of all life-support systems.

  Five hundred metres away, smouldering gently in Valmar’s thin atmosphere, lay the remains of a xenos starship. Its vanes and sails were crumpled, and its swollen hull was open to the elements.

  Jocelyn grunted with satisfaction as he powered past the downed eldar vessel. ‘It was fast,’ he remarked, ‘but fragile.’

  Ingvar studied the wreckage carefully. The human prey had been herded into it during the assault, hauled through the roof like raw meat. Presumably most were still inside the lightless hold, perhaps alive, or perhaps succumbing to the wounds they had suffered.

  Every fibre of his being strained to go back, to at least cut them loose. As Shade gained height, the window for opportunity was shrinking quickly.

  ‘I know what you are thinking,’ said Callimachus, sitting next to him in the cramped cockpit.

  Ingvar looked at him. The Ultramarine’s helm had been ravaged by the xenos shard-weapons, and it would take the artificers weeks to restore it. The tone of Callimachus’s voice was just as it always was – reasonable, calm, phlegmatic. If Ingvar had defied his commander on Fenris in the way he had done with Callimachus down in the corridors, he would have new scars to adorn the old. That was what infuriated him so much – the reasonableness.

  ‘We could secure the station,’ Ingvar said, already knowing all the arguments against but unable not to at least protest. ‘Alert the Guard, get them help.’

  Callimachus shook his head. ‘Mission orders,’ he said, though there was no great satisfaction in his voice. ‘The system’s authorities will respond. They must not know we were here.’

  Ingvar’s irritation flared up again, and he was about to tell Callimachus what he thought of mission orders when a warning alarm chimed from the command console. Jocelyn immediately banked the Thunderhawk hard to the right and brought it back down close to the asteroid’s surface.

  ‘Incoming,’ the Dark Angel reported, powering up the gunship’s weapons again.

  On the far side of the curved horizon, more than one signal had been picked up. They were closing with tell-tale speed – no Imperial vessels moved that fast.

  ‘Xenos, fighter-class,’ said Ingvar, taking in the tactical reading and reaching for the gunnery controls. ‘We can down them.’

  There were four blips on the augurs, nothing that Shade couldn’t handle. It was just as Jocelyn had said – they were fast, but they were fragile.

  ‘Negative,’ ordered Callimachus. ‘Resume exit trajectory, full velocity.’

  Jocelyn did as he was ordered, and the Thunderhawk screamed along at low-level, leaving the installation far behind.

  ‘We’re running?’ demanded Ingvar, disbelieving.

  Callimachus nodded. ‘We are.’

  ‘They’ll finish what they started,’ protested Ingvar. ‘They’ll harvest them.’

  Callimachus turned on him. Through the broken helm-lens, Ingvar thought he could see an anguished expression on the Ultramarine’s face, but it was hard to tell.

  ‘We have what we came for,’ Callimachus said. ‘Nothing will be allowed to jeopardise that.’

  ‘Skítja, we can take them out!’

  Callimachus snapped his gauntlet out, catching Ingvar on the chest and slamming him back into the cockpit’s inner wall. ‘And that is your answer to everything, is it not, Space Wolf?’ he snarled. ‘Nothing you can’t fight, nothing you can’t kill.’ He shook his head disgustedly. ‘They will keep coming, and the longer we stay, the more will come. They bend space in on itself. You know this.’

  Callimachus let go. Ingvar’s first instinct was a strike out in turn, to avenge the insult, to establish his place in the squad. It was what he would have done on Fenris. If he hadn’t, he would not have lasted a week in the packs.

  But the Ultramarine had already turned away from him, ready to assist Jocelyn in the task at hand. Shade was powering clear at full thrust now, its huge engines augmented with all the forbidden technology the ordo had at its disposal. The pilots had more to worry about than him.

  Ingvar, feeling his blood pumping in his temples, glanced down at the tactical display. The xenos craft had pulled out of the pursuit, and had returned to the installation. They were already descending on the ruined dome, no doubt preparing the ground for landing parties.

  There was no going back now. Shade would make the rendezvous with Halliafiore’s command ship as planned, on schedule and with no casualties to report. The flesh-twister would be delivered alive to the tender mercies of the interrogators, and over long decades imprisoned in the void-shielded depths of the Inquisition’s darkest oubliette-fortresses would have priceless information extracted.

  It was a valuable prize, one worth celebrating. That knowledge would save countless more installations, and ones worth much more to the Imperium than Valmar’s Gorge.

  Ingvar punched the wall hard, denting the metal and sending a clang resounding around the cockpit’s interior. None of the others so much as looked at him – they were already busy with course-plotting, or securing the cargo
in place, or just reflecting on a clean first mission.

  He imagined how it would be if he could have gone back. He would have drawn his blade and taken on the xenos, bringing them down one by one. They would have come in their dozens, and he would have slaughtered them in their dozens. If they had brought him down, it would have been a fine death, standing between them and the mortals like the warrior-kings of the old ice.

  They would be inside the perimeter by now. They would be creeping back through the corridors, their needles already withdrawn and their dark minds turning to vengeance.

  Ingvar turned off the scanner. He could already picture Halliafiore’s sleek, satisfied face welcoming them back, and more than anything else he had seen on Valmar’s Gorge, he knew it would make him sick to his stomach.

  The comms room remained dark. Both of them had heard explosions for a long time, like grenades going off. Then there had been the huge booming noise, like a starship coming to land, that had made the whole station shake. They’d felt a massive impact, like a hammer blow against the asteroid’s core.

  Then, for a while, nothing.

  Kaivon was the first to speak. ‘Do you think they’ve done it?’ he whispered.

  Tallia and he were both crouched in the flickered dark. She still had her lasgun trained on the air-duct opening, her eyes locked on to it with impressive dedication.

  Kaivon admired that. She was everything that he wasn’t – disciplined, focused. He could hardly stop shaking still, and every time he blinked he saw again the horrible sights that made him want to start weeping again.

  Eventually, Tallia relaxed. She lowered the weapon by a fraction, though she kept her finger tight on the trigger.

  ‘They’ve done it then, have they?’ asked Kaivon again, anxious and urgent. He wished he’d seen one of them himself now – an Angel of Death, just as the stories said they were, emerging at the time of darkest need, the protectors of the faithful, the guardians of the immortal soul of humanity.

  ‘He said to stay here,’ said Tallia, warily.