onto the enemies that screamed past them, but they could only hold the speeding shapes in the light
for a fraction of a second. A shape dropped from the ceiling, landing lightly atop the vehicle, and the
troopers saw a shadowy blur in the rough outline of a humanoid figure perched on the roof of the
armoured car before the spotlights were shattered.
The panicked troopers manning the turret-mounted heavy bolters opened fire into the darkness,
and muzzle flare lit the area.
A sleek black shape hurtled past, and the mercenaries chased it with high-explosive rounds.
They hit nothing but the walls and pillars of the tunnel, ripping away head-sized chunks of
rockcrete.
The troopers’ mastiffs had erupted into frantic barking and were fighting at their chains. Their
masters turned around on the spot, laslocks held to shoulders as they struggled to sight the enemy.
Dark shapes were zooming through the tunnel, but the troopers’ targeting systems were unable to
lock onto the targets.
There was a blur of movement and one of the troopers was sliced open from groin to throat. He
squeezed the trigger of his weapon as he fell, blasting into the crowd of surging people, cutting
several of them down.
People screamed and ran as the sounds of gunfire echoed deafeningly, fighting each other in
their desperation to get to safety. The other troopers turned left and right, trying desperately to hold
their targets in sight. A shape screamed overhead, and a trooper’s head was severed from its body.
The shape was a hundred metres further up the tunnel before the head hit the ground.
Streams of tiny bladed splinters spat out of the darkness towards the mercenaries manning the
turret of the armoured vehicle. The razor-sharp shards sliced through their armour and flesh, and
blood sprayed out across their pristine white armour.
Their gun silenced, the darkness was once more complete. Screams of terror and pain
accompanied the speeding shapes, invisible in the darkness, as they cut through the air. There was a
sudden gust of displaced air as another high-speed carriage screamed along the tracks in the middle
of the tunnel, the lights from within the automated, servitor-controlled conveyance shining brightly,
sending shadows dancing.
Tall-helmeted figures were visible in the flash of light, dragging people kicking and screaming
back into the darkness.
A beam of pure darkness stabbed into the high-speed transport, rocking it. The beam tore
through the fore-carriage, cutting through the engine block, seats and half a dozen occupants before
passing through the roof, leaving a scorched black ring on the ceiling of the tunnel.
Two more searing beams struck it, and the front carriage was knocked off the rails. With the
squealing of protesting metal, it slammed into the side-barriers, tearing through them in a shower of
sparks. Striking the raised platform at speed, the conveyance tilted up on its nose, and the second
and third carriages buckled behind it and rolled onto their sides.
The whole machine flipped onto its side and smashed over the platform’s edge, tearing the
barrier fully away and smashing through the surging masses. Hundreds were crushed as the
carriages flipped across the platform to the sickening sound of metal being wrenched out of shape
and scraping across the hard platform surface. It slammed into the tunnel wall, crushing more people
between its bulk and the rockcrete walls, and finally came to rest. Electricity discharged across
mined metal wheels and sparked from the rails that had been half-ripped from the floor.
In the wake of the mayhem and silhouetted against the sparks, more black figures advanced
through the press of bodies, smashing people to the ground with sharp blows before dragging their
semi-conscious bodies back into the darkness.
13
Mastiffs yelped as they were torn to shreds by concentrated bursts of deadly fire. A blurred
shape, little more than a vague, hazy outline, moved like quicksilver through the press of humanity,
slicing and cutting, and the last of the Skyllan Indictment Forces were slaughtered without holding
any of the enemy in their sights long enough to fire upon them.
A trio of shapes, in tight formation and moving impossibly fast, veered around the wreckage of
the mined rail conveyance, banking over the heads of the terrified masses as they screamed towards
the rear of the Catalan-class armoured vehicle. It was peppered with spitting gunfire and detonated
as its fuel tanks ruptured, exploding in a blinding fireball that hurled the vehicle across the seething
platform.
The three sleek shapes sped through the inferno unscathed and gunned their engines, hurtling
once more up the tunnel into the darkness, travelling hundreds of metres in seconds.
The blades of the turbine fans began to spin once more, and the strip lights flickered falteringly
before humming back into life. The carnage unleashed in the last twenty minutes was revealed under
the cold light of the glow-strips.
Hundreds of bodies were strewn across the floor, blood pooling beneath them where they had
fallen. The blackened shell of the Catalan-class vehicle was upside down against a wall, pinning half
a dozen charred corpses beneath it. Sparks burst intermittently from the rails, which had buckled and
been torn from their housings.
The ruin of the conveyance’s carriages was testament to its speed when it had crashed, for they
were wrenched out of shape, and their plasglass windows were shattered ruins. Its curved roof had
been half ripped off, and the shattered barrier it had crashed through was twisted beneath it. Bodies,
their heads smashed and limbs severed, were spread around the wreck, either crushed when the
conveyance rolled off the tracks, or thrown from their seats inside. Blackened holes the size of fists
showed where the vehicle had been struck by dark-matter weapons.
There was no sign of any living thing within the tunnel, and not one of the corpses twitched or
groaned. Where earlier the tunnel had seethed with life, now it was utterly bereft, and the only
sounds were the humming of the strip lights, the reverberations of the recycle units and the odd
spark from the mined tracks.
Of the thousands of people not slain, there was no sign. Nor was there any sign of their
attackers. Only the carnage left in their wake was evidence of their having existed at all.
14
CHAPTER TWO
Staring through the twenty-metre wide observation portal of the bridge, Admiral Rutger Augustine
looked out over the vast length of his flagship vessel, the mighty Retribution-class battleship
Hammer of Righteousness.
She looked like an immense, armoured Imperial cathedral, majestic and of such a scale as to be
almost incomprehensible. Six kilometres from stern to prow, hundreds of spires ran along her
length, joined together by flying buttresses and archways, and she bristled with the finest weapon
systems that the Imperial Navy could boast.
Hundreds of close-range turrets were set across her armoured hull, each the size of four superheavy
battle tanks, and a dozen torpedo tubes, each gaping almost forty metres wide, were inset into
her sweeping, massively armoured prow. It was in her broadside batteries, however, that the
Hammer of Righteousness’s true power lay.
Running almost the complete length of the battleship, the starboard and port batteries were
capable of unleashing an incredible amount of firepower, easily enough to cripple even the largest
warship with a single barrage, or lay waste to entire continents if she entered the upper atmosphere
of a rebellious planet. Indeed, the resistance of entire planets had crumpled merely at her appearance
in their sub-system, fearful of the wrath that she could unleash.
Tens of thousands of indentured workers and servitors slaved within the confined gun decks to
load and ready the batteries for firing, and Admiral Augustine was proud to know that his gunnery
crew, under the stern guidance of his master gunner and master of ordnance, were amongst the most
efficient in all of Battlefleet Tempestus.
He never grew weary of looking out across the Hammer of Righteousness, and he knew in his
heart that he never would. Even after all these years of service, the power and scale of the battleship
filled him with awe. Set against the sheer scale of space with its untold millions of solar systems,
she was tiny and insignificant, but it was her duty to protect Imperial space from all threats, xenos or
otherwise.
Constructed in the Adeptus Mechanicus shipyard moons of Gryphonne IV over a period of a
thousand years, Hammer of Righteousness had been in commission, defending Imperial space for
nigh-on eight thousand years. Admiral Augustine had served on her for almost one hundred and
fifteen years, first as a junior officer before moving steadily up through the ranks. He had served on
two other ships after fulfilling his commissioned appointments on the Hammer of Righteousness,
first as a flag-lieutenant on the Lunar-class cruiser Dauntless. After a tenure of fifteen years he had
been promoted to flag-captain of the recommissioned Emperor’s Wrath, which had recently been
reassigned to Segmentum Tempestus. Augustine served aboard this Overlord-class battle cruiser—a
famed veteran of the Gothic wars—for ten years, before he was reassigned back to the Hammer of
Righteousness, the ship where he had began his naval career.
He had held the rank of admiral for forty-two years, and at the age of one hundred and sixty-two,
he was one of the most experienced officers in the fleet. No one knew the nuances and quirks of the
ancient battleship like he did, save perhaps for the ship’s long-serving flag-lieutenant, Gideon
Cortez. Only two other ships assigned to Battlefleet Tempestus were of comparable size, and they
were facing off against the xenos menace in distant sectors of the segmentum. The eastern expanses
were his responsibility, and it was here that he had formed his blockade.
He could not see the enemy with the naked eye, for they were still millions of kilometres away,
but he knew that they were out there and closing on them inexorably. He could see flashes in the
15
distance. From here, they looked almost incongruous, but he knew that more of the enemy bio-ships
were being subjected to concentrated barrages of ordnance.
His fleet was making a good account of itself in this engagement, the most recent of dozens over
the last months, having destroyed two dozen hive-ships for no losses. Still, the xenos fleet continued
to plough relentlessly on into Imperial space. The losses they had suffered made no discernible
impact on the vast tyranid hive-fleet.
Vile bio-organisms that consumed everything in their path, like the locusts of Augustine’s home
world but on a galactic scale, the tyranid menace was a very real threat to the Imperium as a whole.
Four years previously a new hive-fleet had been identified, dubbed Hive Fleet Leviathan. It was
a fitting name. Already billions had lost their lives to its insatiable hunger.
Admiral Augustine stared balefully out into the darkness. For all his years of service he had
proudly defended the reliant worlds of the Imperium from its enemies. Now he was tasked with
destroying those same worlds that he had dedicated his life to protect.
By Lord Inquisitor Kryptman’s order a galactic cordon stretching before the encroaching xenos
fleet was formed. The band of worlds directly in front of the cordon were evacuated, and many of
them utterly destroyed, in order to deny the hive fleet raw organic matter. Any world already under
tyranid invasion was to suffer Exterminatus—the theory being that the xenos would expend much
energy in claiming a world, only to have all living things on the world exterminated. The inquisitor
believed that by stalling the hive fleet’s advance, it would eventually turn aside, towards more
lucrative killing grounds, and thus save the Imperium from devastation. However, it was a cruel and
callous strategy, and not one that sat well with Admiral Augustine, even if it was humanity’s only
hope of stalling the hive fleet. Billions of Imperial citizens had already been evacuated, their home
worlds destroyed, and hundreds of millions had perished, killed by orbital barrages and virus bombs
launched by those sworn to protect them.
He turned away from the observation portal, his movements, like his appearance, crisp and
precise. He strode back along the command deck, his expression unreadable. His staff upon the
bridge went about their work with practiced efficiency and calm, talking in low voices. Several of
them looked up as their admiral passed them by and were greeted with curt nods. Banks of
logisticians, hard-wired into the battleship’s logic engines and monitoring a constant flow of
technical data, murmured as stylus-fingers traced the mnemo-papers feeding from skull-faced
machines. A pair of enginseers were reporting to the flag-lieutenant, Gideon Cortez, and humming
cogitator arrays flickered with updates from the fleet, the eyelids of servitors flickering as
information was relayed.
Augustine moved to the holo-table positioned within a sunken recess in the floor, stepping down
to look upon the position of his fleet. The table was crisscrossed with a grid of glowing green lines,
indicating spatial parameters, and scale models of the entire fleet were positioned across its smooth
expanse.
He took a moment to study the formations. Most of the fleet, seventy-two vessels of escort class
and higher, had formed a bulwark spreading across the system with the Hammer of Righteousness at
its centre. The cruiser Valkyrie, accompanied by three squadrons of smaller frigates and destroyers,
was out in front, slowing the vanguard of the tyranid fleet to enable the pleasure world of Circe to
fully evacuate, formless black spheres being placed on the table to represent the known enemy
forces. More of them were being put on the table all the time, placed there by lobotomised servitors
hanging like twisted marionettes amid the gently hissing mechanics above the table.
The bio-mechanical amalgamations had no lower torso or legs. Their upper bodies, replete with
wires and cables protruding from their pallid flesh, were attached to multi-jointed mechanical
armatures that whirred and hissed as they extended and retracted, accurately moving and placing the
