He raised his glass up to his eyes, gazing at the play of light upon the ruby liquid as he sloshed it
around the ice. Then he knocked the drink back, savouring its bite. He placed the glass down on its
coaster, and rubbed at his temples with both hands, his eyes closed.
“Bad news, guildmaster?” ventured a voice.
Polio turned to face his young adjutant, Leto. He was little more than a boy, barely having the
need to shave yet, and his eyes flicked around nervously as he waited for his answer. He was young,
but he was a good officer and had a mind like a sponge. He knew that in time he would have made a
suitable guildmaster, but such a thing was not to be.
“You should have gone with the others, Leto,” he said, his voice tired.
“I will leave when you leave,” replied his adjutant.
When the first astrotelepathic despatches had come, warning of the xenos hive fleet’s approach,
Polio’s distaff had been aghast. That had quickly descended into panic when the extreme dictate to
combat this threat had been transmitted, and that panic had not been aided by the sudden departure
of the Administratum’s advocate of Perdus Skylla.
“This world has been condemned to death,” the administrator had whined as he frantically
gathered up his possessions. “You are a fool to stay behind.”
“I will not leave until the guilds are fully evacuated,” Polio had replied, his voice unwavering. “I
will not abandon my post and leave those who depend upon me to their fate.”
“Do not judge me, guildmaster,” the administrator had snapped. “I am a servant of the
Administratum, and with the mining facilities abandoned I see no purpose in my remaining here. If
you have any sense at all, you will leave Perdus Skylla immediately. Coordinate the evacuation
from space if your conscience demands such a thing.”
Guildmaster Polio had wanted to strike the man, but he had held his anger in check. He had
turned his back on the administrator, and had watched as his shuttle left the moon for the safety of
the Imperial blockade. He had ordered his distaff to vacate Perdus Skylla, and he had seen the relief
in their faces at his order. He did not think badly of them as they saluted him and boarded the first
chartered evacuation ships.
“Why will you not go?” Leto had asked him.
“I swore an oath of service to the guilds of Perdus Skylla. My leadership will be needed in the
evacuation effort. It sends a message to the guilds, and the populace, if I remain.”
“Then I shall remain with you, sir,” said the boy.
Polio had promoted him to be his adjutant, and had been pleasantly surprised to find that the
young man adapted to his role admirably.
Polio sighed, picked up the reports and flicked them to Leto. The young man caught them
awkwardly, and scanned their contents. The guildmaster poured himself another drink as his
adjutant looked at the first of the reports. Leto looked up in shock, his face pale.
“Keep reading,” said Guildmaster Polio.
24
The reports contained disturbing information: evidence of slaughter in three of the main mid-ice
access highways that linked the Phorcys starport to the guilds. The attacks had occurred just hours
earlier, and there had been no survivors nor any eyewitnesses. It was impossible to gauge the
number of casualties, but there was something in the realm of twelve thousand citizens reported
missing. Thousands more had been killed in the stampede to get out of the tunnels, and the Skyllan
Interdiction Forces had shut the access tunnels down, pending an armoured investigation.
Three guilds, two of them major houses, had no direct access to the evacuation freighters. That
translated as almost four million people, trapped on Perdus Skylla until the tunnels were opened, for
it would be almost impossible for them to make the journey on foot.
Three days had been the estimate before the xenos fleet made planet-fall. It had been a logistical
impossibility to evacuate all of Perdus Skylla in that time, but now with access tunnels locked
down?
Guildmaster Polio was a realist. He did not delude himself into thinking that he ever had even
half a chance of getting more than perhaps twenty per cent of the population of Perdus Skylla offworld;
there were just not enough ships to facilitate the evacuation. He cursed the bureaucracy of the
Administratum that had given his world such callously short notice of its doom.
He had finished his glass of amasec by the time his adjutant had read through all the despatches.
“What does it mean, master?” asked Leto, his face pale.
“It means,” said Polio, cradling his empty glass, “that there are enemy forces already on Perdus
Skylla.”
“The… the tyranids?”
“I don’t think so, no,” said Leto. “Something entirely else.”
With a sound akin to the birth-scream of a fledgling god, the Infidus Diabolus ripped through the
skin of the warp and entered real-space. Flickering arcs of energy danced across its hull, coalescing
over the towering spires and cathedrals devoted to the dark gods of the ether. The full awesome
majesty of the strike cruiser slipped from the protective womb of the immaterium, and the rift was
sealed behind it.
Within the bridge of the colossal vessel, Marduk and Kol Badar leaned over the flickering datascreens
before them, studying the stream of information being relayed. They saw an image of the
sub-system, spinning slowly, and flashes of light began to appear, marking the positions of planets,
ships and radiation fields.
Remnants of the warp remained within the ship, and scenes of depravity and bloodshed flashed
up over the screens, momentarily disrupting the feed of information. For a fraction of a second, the
screens showed a skinless face, its eyes on fire and its cheeks pierced by blades, before they
returned to normal. A moment later, the screens flashed again, and an image of a writhing, bloodsoaked
figure appeared on the pict screens for less than a tenth of a second, accompanied by the
blare of static, overlaid with unholy roars and screams.
The pair of Word Bearers ignored the distractions, peering through the ghost-images of daemons
ripping apart flesh and bubbling blood that appeared on the screens, focusing on the wealth of subsystem
information being picked up by the daemonic sensor-arrays protruding from the prow of the
Infidus Diabolus. They saw the conglomeration of Imperial vessels forming an unbroken line across
the system and the flickering waves of warp-energy that marked jump-points, and located the
position of the target: the moon the Imperials called Perdus Skylla.
The sounds of Chaos croaked from grilled vox-speakers and discords throughout the ship, a
blaring cacophony of madness and rage. Bellows and screams were overlaid with inhuman
screeches and hateful whispers, and the painful squeal of scraping metal blurred with the relentless
pounding of hammers and gears, the sound of flesh being rent by steel, the roar of the fires of hell
and the plaintive weeping of children. It was a beautiful din, one that calmed Marduk’s mind,
though to listen too deeply was to give yourself over to insanity.
25
A face appeared on the central pict screen, its eyes black as pitch and its cheeks carved with
bloody sigils, and it opened its mouth wide, exposing a mass of writhing serpents, spiders and
worms.
“Enough,” barked Marduk, banishing the daemon with a wave of his hand. Instantly, the
snarling image disappeared.
More flashing lights and runic symbols appeared on the representation of the surrounding
galactic plane, and both Marduk and Kol Badar leant forward to peer upon them. Kol Badar snorted
and leant back. A bitter laugh burst from Marduk’s lips, the sound making the image on the pict
viewers shimmer with static.
“It would seem, Coryphaus, that the Imperium is engaged in a war in this little solar system,”
said Marduk, “and they are losing.”
“Admiral,” someone shouted.
Rutger Augustine pulled his gaze away from the scale model representations of the fleet and
turned to see one of his petty officers moving towards him.
“Go ahead,” he said.
The petty officer was flushed and he carried a transmission card, its waxy surface punched with
a series of holes. He thrust it towards the admiral.
“Sir, Battle Group Orion has picked up a warp-echo emanating from jump-point XIV. It has
been verified by our own Navigatorii.”
Augustine frowned at the transmission card, and then turned and fed it into the chest-slot of the
servitor unit wired into his command console. The servitor jerked, and its needle finger began to
punch away at a set of keys in front of it. Ignoring the drooling servitor, Augustine looked at the
transmission data as it was relayed onto the screen.
“What is it?” he asked. “A rogue hive ship? Don’t say the bastards have got behind us.”
“No sir. Initial sweeps indicate a vessel of cruiser mass, but it is not an organic entity.”
“No? Probably another trade vessel come to aid the evacuations. Why are you bothering me with
this?” asked Admiral Augustine. “The fleet is engaging the xenos threat, petty officer!”
“I’m sorry, sir, and it may be nothing, but the long-range scan that Battle Group Orion
performed seemed to indicate that the vessel may be an Astartes strike cruiser or battle-barge.”
Augustine frowned.
“I was notified of no Space Marine presence inbound, though we could do with their aid.” He
rubbed a hand across his freshly shaved chin. “Have Orion send a frigate squadron on an intercept
course with the vessel, and keep me informed of any updates.”
With that, the admiral turned away from the petty officer. “Yes, admiral.”
The Infidus Diabolus ploughed through the vacuum of space, its plasma-core engines burning bluewhite
as it closed towards the vast red giant sun around which the solar system rotated. Solar flares a
million kilometres in height burst from the daemonic red corona, leaping up from around dark
sunspots that blemished its unstable surface.
The sun was dying. Five billion years earlier it was less than one hundredth of its current size,
though it had burnt over ten times as hot. Having exhausted its gaseous core, it had expanded
exponentially, engulfing its nearest planets. Even as it grew in size, it was diminished in mass, and
the outer planets circling it began to pull further away, its gravitational hold over them weakening.
Now it burnt the colour of hell itself, but in another billion years it would be no more.
The Infidus Diabolus dropped closer to the hellish, glowing corona, buffeted by solar winds.
There, with intense spikes of radiation spilling around her hull, she drew anchor.
26
“I would hear your council, revered Warmonger,” said Marduk. He ran the fingers of his hand
thoughtfully along the surface of a stone column. A cold wind gusted through the darkness, tugging
at Marduk’s cloak, and a mechanical scream of insane rage echoed from deeper within the crypt.
Marduk and Kol Badar stood beneath the shadow of a wide archway, facing into a cavernous
alcove set into the side of the expansive passageway. They were deep within the depths of the
Infidus Diabolus, in the undercroft that housed those warriors of the Host that had long ago fallen in
holy battle, but had not been allowed to pass on into blessed oblivion.
The damned warriors lived on in the deepest labyrinthine catacombs of the strike cruiser,
condemned to a tortured limbo, neither living nor dead, the shattered remnants of their earthly forms
interred in great sarcophagi that they might serve the Host even after their time had long passed.
A delicate mural decorated the back wall of the alcove, detailing the great moments of the
Warmonger’s life before he had been condemned to an eternity of servitude within the towering
mechanical form of a Dreadnought.
Once he had been amongst Lorgar’s most favoured and devout chaplains, the first Dark Apostle
of the 34th Company Host that Marduk now led. He had fought alongside the god primarchs, and
counted such exalted heroes as Erebus, Kor Phaeron and Abaddon as his battle-brothers. Marduk
had listened in awe to the scratchy vox-recordings of his passionate sermons, and had pored over a
thousand volumes of his thoughtful scripture, and his fiery rhetoric and hate-filled sermons never
failed to inspire.
Though the other warriors interred within the Dreadnoughts of the Host had long ago lost any
semblance of sanity, cursed as they were and unable to attain oblivion yet denied the physical
sensations of holy war, the Warmonger retained a coherent self-awareness, and was a source of
great wisdom and council.
It was his unshakeable faith that kept him lucid. Holy Erebus had once said, the power and
conviction of his rapturous belief that kept him from toppling off the precipice into madness.
A thousand blood-candles ringed the mighty Warmonger, tended day and night by a pair of
slave-proselytes to ensure that the flames never died, and their light cast a divine glow over the
Dreadnought’s sarcophagus.
It towered over Marduk, even Kol Badar, standing over five metres tall with the armoured
sarcophagus that held the Dark Apostle’s shattered remains at its heart. The Dreadnought stood on
squat, powerful legs, and immense arms bearing ancient heavy weapons systems were held
immobile at its side.
For hundreds of years at a time the Warmonger stood motionless within its own death shrine,
lost in contemplation, waiting for holy battle to be joined once more.
“It is pleasing to my soul to see you once more, First Acolyte Marduk,” boomed the
Warmonger, its voice a deep reverberating baritone, the words spoken slowly and deliberately, “and
you, Kol Badar, finest of my captains.”
The two warriors bowed their heads in deference.
“The loss of Jarulek pains me,” continued the Warmonger. “Though in you I see a worthy
successor, young disciple Marduk.”
“Jaruilek’s death cuts me deeply as well, revered Warmonger,” said Marduk. A slight smile
curled his lips as he felt Kol Badar’s anger at his words. “I am honoured to fill the role of religious
leader of the Host, though I feel… unworthy of such a hallowed duty.”
“It is only right that you step into the breach and guide the flock,” said the Warmonger. “Your
star is in the ascendant. Feel not unworthy of the duty; be humbled by it, but never doubt your right
to serve. The gods have ordained it.”
Marduk turned his head to Kol Badar and smiled.
