daemon. He felt the creature Borhg’ash within his chainsword stir at his words.
The kneeling men were surrounding by dozens of burning blood-candles, the light of their
flames the only thing holding the darkness of the room at bay. They flickered as Marduk continued
his incantation, the flames straining in towards the First Acolyte.
Whispers could be heard, flittering around the dark edges of the room, and Marduk welcomed
them, for they spoke of the arrival of the Kathartes. The flickering of the candles increased, and a
howling sound began to circle the gathered group as Marduk’s voice rose.
The blood of the Speaker, pooling out on the floor of the room, began to bubble, and Marduk
knelt and placed both hands in the rapidly heating liquid.
Marduk continued to speak the words of the Calling and stepped towards the kneeling figure of
Karalos, placing a bloody hand on either side of the man’s head. He held onto his head firmly,
feeling the skull compress beneath his hands, and continued his complex incantation.
Karalos began to writhe and twitch, but Marduk did not release his grip, holding tightly to the
man’s head. The cultist’s eyes began to bleed and blood seeped from his ears, but still Marduk
continued to chant and clasp the man. He could feel the power of the warp opening up, its strength
pulsing through his hands into the boiling brain of the man beneath him, but Karalos made not a
sound, silently welcoming the beast that was emerging within his flesh.
With a final barked stream of daemonic words, Marduk pushed Karalos away from him. The
man stood for a moment twitching, blood streaming from his eyes, before he fell to the ground,
writhing and convulsing. A flickering blur seemed to overlap the thrashing figure, flashing between
the body of a mortal man and the insubstantial form of something distinctly other. His tongue
bulged from his mouth and he arched his back unnaturally, before breaking into severe muscle
contractions that threw his body across the floor. Bones broke under his exertions and his spine
twisted horribly, tendons and sinews tearing and ripping. The other men stood hurriedly and backed
away from the wildly jerking man, horrified fascination and devotion on their faces.
The man’s flickering flesh bulged unnaturally, as if things held within were trying to burst free,
and he scratched frantically at the skin of his face, ripping bloody rents. The bones of his fingers
lengthened and pushed through the skin of his fingertips, curving out into sharp talons, and he
ripped at his skin and clothes, tearing them off in bloody strips.
He rolled over and over on the ground, ripping and tearing at his flesh frenziedly, every muscle
of his body straining. Blood vessels bulged on his neck and at his temples, and he lacerated his skin
with his long talons as he continued to spasm and convulse soundlessly.
His teeth lengthened into fine points and he bit into his own shoulder, ripping off chunks of
meat.
Marduk smiled and crossed his arms over his chest.
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The thing that had been Karalos entered even more frantic convulsions, ripping and tearing at its
flesh, until it finally went still. It lay for a moment, bloody and broken, before it picked itself up
from the ground and crouched, its skinless face turned towards the First Acolyte, staring at him with
eyeless, bloody sockets. Almost its entire bloodied musculature was displayed, and only patches of
raw, red skin clung to its frame. The hazy flickering still overlapped the creature, blurring its image
slightly and hurting the eye.
An extra, backwards bending joint had formed in the lower leg of the daemon creature, in the
manner of a bird, and long talons emerged from its toes. With a sickening, wet cracking sound, a
pair of long, skeletal wings unfolded from the monster’s back, sheets of bloody skin hanging limply
between the bloody bones.
Opening its sharp-toothed, lipless maw wide, the daemon creature hissed hollowly at Marduk,
like some newly hatched chick crying to its mother for food. He smiled broadly, the flickering
candlelight glinting in his eyes.
“Karalos is no more,” spoke Marduk. “He gave up his mortal vessel selflessly that this katharte
might come into existence.”
The gathered men stared at the daemon with wide eyes. The air tasted electric: like the taste of
Chaos.
“Now, all of you will selflessly give yourselves up to Chaos as good Karalos did,” said Marduk,
“for that is what I wish, and through my words you hear the desire of the gods themselves.”
The gathered men glanced warily at each other. “Well,” said Marduk to the daemon clawing at
the floor in front of him, licking itself with a long, barbed tongue, “call the flock.” The men in the
room fell to the ground as one, blood running from their eyes and ears, and they began to convulse.
“It’s not right,” said Sergeant Elias of the 72nd Elysian storm troopers, hotly. “We are the damned
elite. We are not meant to be the grunts of the Imperium, plodding through the mud and crap getting
gunned down in droves. We ain’t that kind of regiment. We are…”
“The glory boys?” suggested Captain Laron wryly. The captain was a big, blond haired soldier,
born of pure Elysian stock. Brash, strong and proud, he was the perfect captain for the brash, strong
and proud storm troopers of the 72nd. If any other soldier or officer had spoken to him in such a
way he would have had the man disciplined, but Elias had been his comrade for decades. He had
fought alongside the man long before he had been captain, or even sergeant.
“Damn right we are!” said Elias with considerable passion. “It’s the job of the other regiments to
grind mindlessly up the centre. We are the elite, fast in and fast out.”
“I’m sure the camp women appreciate that, sergeant.”
Elias laughed at that. “But you know what I mean, sir. We don’t have the sheer number of men
or tanks to fight a conventional frontal assault, not against this enemy.”
“Who said we would be fighting a conventional frontal assault? The brigadier-general is not a
damn fool.”
“I know that he is not, sir, but… I still don’t know why we didn’t just drop on Shinar and have
this whole thing over with as soon as possible.”
“We do that and the entire damn regiment would be slaughtered. The air defences of Shinar are
strong. Don’t be thickheaded, Elias. Use your brains for a change and stop thinking with your damn
balls!”
Elias grinned suddenly. “I do have a big old pair of balls though, captain.”
“The sentinels on recon reported yet?”
“Another hour before the next report, sir.”
“Well, keep Colonel Boerl informed. If they see any enemy movement, report in immediately.
We must secure those highlands. The brigadier-general says the enemy may be up there already. If
that’s the case, then without artillery support to make the bastards keep their heads down, we will be
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weathering the storm trying to land. If they are up there, it is not going to be easy to take it off
them.”
“If anyone can take it off them, it’ll be the 72nd,” said Elias, turning towards his superior. The
captain was looking out across the plains to where the Adeptus Mechanicus battle force was making
ready to move out.
“What do you make of them, sir?” asked Elias, indicating the massing Adeptus Mechanicus
tech-guard with an incline of his head. Ever more of the disturbing warriors and war machines of
Mars were disembarking from the wide-bodied Mechanicus loaders.
Captain Laron curled his lip in distaste. “Never seen a concentration of them like this.”
The earth boomed as another of the massive cargo-transports of the Mechanicus landed,
throwing up a cloud of salt grit. Hulking, slow moving, tracked crawler vehicles emerged from
transports that had already landed, each led by a procession of censor waving, red-robed adepts of
the Machine-God. From others came more of the pale fleshed tech-guard soldiers, marching in
perfect, rectangular phalanx blocks, ten deep and a hundred wide.
Those phalanxes that had already disembarked were arrayed in their rigid formations, standing
stone still on the salt plains, awaiting further instruction. Laron was certain that if no instruction
came, they would stand unmoving, arrayed as they were until the cursed salt winds buried them.
Even then, he supposed that the mindless things would be still, awaiting instruction.
From a distance, they might have been mistaken for regular Imperial Guard infantry platoons,
though an observant onlooker would see that they were far too still to be completely human. They
stood in serried ranks with lasguns held motionless over their chests, and many of their faces were
all but obscured by deep visored helmets.
On closer inspection, many of the tech-guard soldiers looked less like Imperial Guardsmen and
more like semi-mechanical servitors.
Servitors existed in every facet of Imperial life, fulfilling all manner of menial, dangerous tasks,
but to see so many of them gathered together in one place for the sole purpose of war was highly
disturbing to the Elysians. Servitors were neither truly alive nor truly dead. They had been human
once, but all vestiges of that humanity had been long lost. Their frontal lobes had been surgically
removed and their weak flesh improved upon with the addition of mechanics. These varied
depending on the task that they were required to perform. They might have had their arms removed
and replaced with power lifters or diamond-tipped drills the size of a man’s leg to work in one of the
millions of manufactorums across the Imperium, or be hard-wired into the logic engines of battle
cruisers to maintain the ships’ support functions.
The tech-guard soldiers arrayed upon the plains were created specifically for the arena of war.
Amputated arms had been replaced with heavy weaponry, and targeting sensors and arrays filled the
sockets where fleshy eyeballs had been plucked. Power generators were built onto the shoulders of
some, and they stood immobile beside gun-servitors, cables and wiring trailing between the pair.
Others had single, large servo-arms replacing one or more of their removed limbs, giving them an
ungainly, limping gait as servos straggled under the weight. These mechanical arms were as easily
capable of ripping a man’s head from his shoulders as lifting heavy equipment, and some bore
oversized rotary blades or power drills that could cut or punch through the heaviest of armour.
Amongst the phalanxes were smaller contingents of heavier, tracked servitor units. The lower
bodies of these servitors had been removed so that they had become one with their means of
conveyance. These bore heavier payloads of ammunition that spooled into the large, multiple
barrelled cannons that replaced the organic right arms of the servitors.
In between the ranks of Martian foot soldiers were tracked crawlers, one for every phalanx.
They were Ordinatus Minoris crawlers, and each was the length of three Leman Russ battle tanks.
They had two, wide track units, one at the front and one at the rear, and between these was
supported the mass of the war machine. Heavy girders and steel struts supported huge weapons, and
each crawler had dozens of red-robed adepts and servitors as crew. Steel ladders rose to the control
50
cabins that were offset from the main guns. Laron did not recognise the weapons that these
behemoths of steel and bronze bore, but the massive, steaming couplings and humming generators
upon their backs spoke of immense contained power.
But these were as nothing to the sheer scale of the crawler that was emerging slowly from a
lander of truly giant proportions.
“Emperor above,” said Elias. “Would you look at the damn size of that thing!”
It bore a resemblance to the Ordinatus Minoris crawlers in the way that a fully grown adult bears
a resemblance to its mewling newborn. It rolled forward on what must have been sixteen tracked
crawler units, led by a stream of tech-priests. The size of the smaller tracked crawlers were rendered
insignificant next to the immense vastness of the Ordinatus machine.
It was the size of a city block and was protected with thick layers of armoured plating. More
than ten storeys of platforms rose up around the massive central weapon that the Ordinatus
supported, a weapon the size of a small cruiser that ran down the entire length of the immense
machine. Criss-crossing lattice works of steel supported gantries running around the circumference
of the weapon, and a pair of quad-barrelled anti-aircraft guns rotated atop the control cabin above
the highest deck level. Giant, claw-like, spiked arms were held aloft on either side of the Ordinatus,
and Laron guessed that the huge piston engines behind them would drive them into the ground when
the Ordinatus was readying to fire, to give the machine additional stability. That a thing that size
needed stabilising legs was testament to the awesome power that it could unleash.
“Impressive,” said Laron somewhat reluctantly.
The sergeant put a hand to his ear as his micro-bead clicked.
“The Valkyries are ready and waiting, captain. They fly on your say-so.”
“Good. Colonel Boerl will be joining us on the drop.”
“I feel safer already.”
“Cut the crap, Elias,” snapped Laron. Even with Elias, he had his limits. The colonel of the 72nd
was a hardened veteran, and he would hear nothing against the man.
“Let’s go take those damn highlands.”
He raised his crozius before him. Blood hissed along the length of the hallowed staff of office,
boiling and spitting under the surging electricity coursing up the haft. Once it had represented faith
in the Imperium, belief in the Emperor and the optimistic confidence that the Crusades pushing out
from great Terra would bring enlightenment to the galaxy.
Spitting, he sneered at the pathetic sentiment. Now he stood on Terra once more, as the greatest
battle in the history of mankind was unfolding.
His crozius was dedicated to beings of far greater power than the deceitful Emperor. It
represented faith as it always had, inspiring devotion and fervour in the Legion as it smote the nonbelievers,
but this was a far more pure faith than merely a shallow belief and optimism that looked
to a bright future for mankind.
This was true faith. The Emperor had been wrong. There were omnipotent gods in existence,
and they wielded power beyond imagining. No cold, distant deities that watched the plight of their
