Sarpedon sank back down to his haunches. He could not think what Kaiyon might have told the
Imperial Fists interrogators. The Fists knew the Soul Drinkers were mutants – one glance at Sarpedon
was enough to tell them that. The Fists had collected evidence of the Soul Drinkers’ deeds, including
many that had pitted them against the forces of the Imperium from which the Soul Drinkers had rebelled.
He could think of nothing more damaging than any of that.
But what had happened to the flock? They were the Soul Drinkers whose officers had died in the
gradual erosion of the Chapter’s strength, and who had turned to Chaplain Iktinos for leadership. They
had become intense and inspired under Iktinos, but insane? Sarpedon did not know what to make of it.
‘I don’t know what Kaiyon told you,’ he said to Lysander. ‘Good luck with confirming his words. I
doubt whatever you find can make our fate any worse.’
‘So be it, Sarpedon,’ said Lysander. ‘The trials will begin soon. The fate of your Chapter rests in no
little part on what you will have to say to yourself. I suggest you think on it, if you believe your brothers
deserve more than a common heretic’s death.’
‘I have nothing to say,’ said Sarpedon. ‘Certainly nothing that will change any fate you have in mind
for me.’
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‘I could have executed you on Selaaca,’ said Lysander. ‘Remember that the next time you bemoan
your fate.’
The window slammed shut. Lysander was correct. He had defeated Sarpedon face to face on
Selaaca and few servants of the Imperium would have had any compunction about killing him out of
hand.
Sarpedon turned back to the desk and took up the quill again.
I have seen, he wrote, that our present and future, the mark we will leave on the galaxy,
depends on the insistence of one misguidedly honourable man to execute us in accordance with
the word of law.
Is this a mockery by the galaxy, to condemn us by the virtues of another? I could decide it is
so. I could curse the universe and rail against our lot. But I choose to see the Emperor has given
us this – a stay of execution, a few moments to have our say before our peers – as a gift to those
who served Him instead of the Imperium.
What can we make of this? What victory can we mine from such a thin seam? It is the way of
the Astartes to see victory in the smallest hope. I shall seek it now. My brothers, I wish I could
speak with you and bid you do the same, but I am isolated from you. I hope you, too, can see
something other than despair, even if it is only a thought turned to hope and duty when the end
comes.
Seek victory, my brethren. I pray that in your souls, at least, the Soul Drinkers cannot be
defeated.
‘THRONE ALIVE,’ HISSED Scout Orfos. ‘Such death. Such foul xenos work.’
The surface of Selaaca rolled by beneath the Thunderhawk gunship. Through the open rear ramp the
grey landscape rippled through ruined cities and expanses of tarnished metal, obsidian pillars rising from
deep valleys choked with pollution and the shores of black, dead seas lapping against shores scattered
with collapsed buildings.
The human presence on Selaaca was now no more than scars, the ruined crust of a long-dead organ.
The necrons had built over it, vast sheets of metal, pyramids, tomb complexes and patterns of obelisks
which had no discernible purpose other than to mark Selaaca as a planet that belonged to them.
‘Dwell not on the xenos,’ said Scout-Sergeant Borakis. He was old and grizzled where the Scouts
were young, his voice gravelly thanks to the old wound on his throat, his armour festooned with
kill-marks and trophies while the Scouts under his command were not yet permitted to mark their
armour. Borakis leaned towards the open ramp, gripping the handhold mounted overhead. ‘It is not your
place to seek to understand the enemy. It is enough to know only that he must be killed!’
‘Of course, Scout-sergeant,’ said Orfos, backing away from the ramp.
The Thunderhawk flew down low over a range of hills studded with obelisks and pylons, as if
metallic tendrils had forced their way out of the ground to escape the bleak gravity of Selaaca. Patterns
of silver like metal roads spiralled around the peaks and valleys, and sparks of power still spat between a
few of the pylons.
‘We’re closing in on mark one,’ came the pilot’s voice from the cockpit of the Thunderhawk. The
crew were two of the thousands of Chapter staff and crew who inhabited the Phalanx, a vast support
network for the Imperial Fists’ campaigns. Using star maps developed by the Adeptus Mechanicus, the
strike cruiser Mantle of Wrath had penetrated further into the Veiled Region than any Space Marine
craft before it, to follow up the information extracted by the Castellan during his interrogation of a Soul
Drinkers captive.
The ground rippled as the Thunderhawk hovered down low to land. The landing gear touched the
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blasted earth and Borakis led his squad out. Borakis and his four Scouts deployed with the speed and
fluidity that years of training had given them, spreading out to cover all angles with bolt pistols. Borakis
carried a shotgun as old and scarred as he was, and in his other hand checked the auspex scanner loaded
with the coordinates the Castellan had given him.
‘Laokan! Take the point! Orfos, you’re watching our backs. Kalliax, Caius, with me.’ Borakis
pointed in the direction the auspex indicated, over the dead earth.
Once, these hills had been forested. Stumps and exposed roots remained, shorn down to ground
level. Up close the pylons looked like spinal columns worked in steel, blackened by the haze of pollution
that hung overhead. The obelisks were fingers of a substance so black it seemed to drink the light. A faint
hum ran up through the ground, the echo of machinery far below.
‘The xenos have not departed this place,’ said Orfos quietly. ‘This world is dead, but these xenos
never lived.’
‘It is an ill-omened world,’ agreed Scout Caius. ‘I hope our work here is quick.’
‘Hope,’ said Borakis sternly, ‘is a poisoned gift, given by our weaknesses. Do not follow hope.
Follow your duty. If your duty is to fight on this world for a thousand years, Scout-novice, then you will
give thanks to the Emperor for it. Move on.’
The squad moved down the hillside into a narrow valley where mist coiled around their ankles and
the valley sides rose like walls of torn earth. The auspex blinked a path towards a formation of rocks that
would have been completely uninteresting if it had not corresponded to the location given by Brother
Kaiyon under interrogation. On closer inspection the rocks formed two pillars and a lintel, a doorway in
the valley wall blocked by a tangle of fallen stone.
‘Charges,’ said Borakis.
Brother Kalliax crouched by the rocks, setting up a bundle of explosive charges. The cog symbol on
his right pauldron signified his acceptance as an apprentice to the Techmarines of the Imperial Fists.
‘What do you see, Orfos?’ said Borakis.
‘No movement, sergeant,’ replied Orfos, scanning the crests of the valley ridges for signs of hostiles.
The intelligence on Selaaca’s hostiles was sketchy. The Imperial Fists had fought the necrons before,
but their inhuman intelligence made the xenos impossible to interrogate and their goals could only be
guessed at. Selaaca’s necrons were, according to the interrogated Soul Drinkers, a broken and
leaderless force, but there were certainly necrons still on the planet and no telling how they might have
organised themselves since the Imperial Fists had captured the Soul Drinkers there.
‘Ready,’ said Kalliax.
The Scout squad backed away from the entrance and Kalliax detonated the charge, blowing the
blockage apart in a shower of dirt and stone. The blast echoed across the valley, shuddering the valley
walls and starting a dozen tiny rockfalls.
‘Move in,’ said Borakis.
Laokan moved through the falling earth, his bolt pistol trained on the darkness revealed between the
lintels. The darkness gave way to dressed stone and carvings inside.
The walls of the passageway were carved with repeating chalices, intertwined with eagles and skulls.
The squad shadowed Laokan’s movement as he crossed the threshold into the passageway.
The floor shifted under his feet. Laokan dropped instinctively to one knee. A line of green light
shimmered over him and a camera lens winked in the ceiling as it focussed on him.
‘Bleed,’ said an artificial voice.
Laokan backed away slowly. The lens stayed focussed on him.
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‘Bleed,’ repeated the voice.
‘Stand down, Scout,’ said Borakis. He walked past Laokan and drew his combat knife. The blade
was as long as the sergeant’s forearm, serrated and etched with lines of Imperial scripture. Borakis’s
Scout armour, much less bulky than a full suit of power armour, had an armoured wrist guard that
Borakis unbuckled from his left arm. He drew the knife along his left wrist and a bright scarlet trail ran
down his hand.
Borakis flicked the blood off his hand into the passageway. It spattered across the walls and floor.
‘Astartes haemotypes detected,’ said the voice again, the lens this time roving over the sergeant.
Light flickered on along the passage way, lighting the way deep into the hillside.
‘We’re in the right place,’ said Borakis. ‘Follow me.’
Borakis and the Scouts entered the hillside, pistols trained on every shadow.
The Mantle of Wrath had two missions over Selaaca. The first was to deliver the Scout squad to
follow up the Castellan’s intelligence. The other was to begin the destruction of the Soul Drinkers.
The Mantle was one of the better-armed ships in the Imperial Fists fleet, but for this mission its
torpedo bays had been stripped out and replaced with high-yield charges normally used for orbital
demolitions. The Mantle did not have long to wait in orbit over Selaaca before its target drifted into view,
its massive bulk darkening the glare of Selaaca’s sun.
Few Imperial Fists would ever need more proof of the Soul Drinkers’ corruption than the
Brokenback. Many a Fist had fought on a space hulk, one of the cursed ships lost in the warp and
regurgitated back into realspace teeming with xenos or worse. The Brokenback was as huge and ugly a
space hulk as any had seen, hundreds of smaller ships welded into a single lumbering mass by the tides of
the warp. Imperial warships ten thousand years old jostled with xenos ships, vast cargo freighters and
masses of twisted metal that bore no resemblance to anything that had ever crossed the void.
Thousands of crew on the Mantle prepared the torpedo arrays as the strike cruiser manoeuvred into
position. Damage control crews were called to battle stations, for while the Brokenback was unmanned
no one could be sure of what automated defences the hulk might have. As the Mantle approached firing
position, the Imperial Fists officers and the unaugmented crewmen waited for the space hulk to leap into
life and rain destruction from a dozen warships onto the Mantle of Wrath.
The hulk’s weapons stayed silent. A spread of torpedoes glittered against the void as they launched
from the Mantle, leaving ripples of silvery fire in their wake. Defensive turrets, which would normally
have shot down every one of the torpedoes, stayed silent as the first spread impacted into the space hulk
amidships.
Bright explosions blossomed against the void, flashes of energy robbed of power an instant later by
the vacuum. Shattered chunks of hulls floated outwards in clouds of debris, leaving open wounds of torn
metal in the side of the Brokenback.
The space hulk was too big for a single volley, even of the high-yield demolition charges, to destroy.
The Mantle of Wrath pumped out wave after wave of torpedoes. One volley blew an Imperial warship
free of the space hulk’s mass and the ship span away from its parent, trailing coils of burning plasma and
revealing the twisted steel honeycomb inside. Ruined orbital yachts and xenos fighter craft tumbled out of
the rents opened up in the hull.
Moment by moment, the whole Brokenback came apart. Selaaca’s gravity drew the fragments down
and the whole hulk rotated. The volley had opened up a weak point in the depths of the hulk’s mass and
an enormous section of the stern bent away from it, dragged down towards the greyish disc of Selaaca.
The Brokenback could not resist orbital decay any longer. Its idling engines, which did the bare
minimum of work to keep it in orbit, failed as plasma reactors collapsed and power systems were
severed. Over the course of the next few hours the stern of the hulk was scoured by the upper
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atmosphere and broke away entirely, followed by millions of chunks of debris raining down onto the
planet. Like a dying whale the rest of the Brokenback lolled over and fell into the gravity well of Selaaca,
gathering speed as it fell, its lower edges glowing cherry-red, then white, with friction.
The Brokenback disappeared into Selaaca’s cloudy sky. Most of it, the Mantle’s augurs divined,
would come down in one of Selaaca’s stagnant oceans, the rest scattered over a coastline.
The Mantle of Wrath had fulfilled one of its duties. The space hulk Brokenback was gone, and no
renegade would ever use it to resurrect the Soul Drinkers’ heresies.
The only duties keeping the ship over Selaaca was the Scout squad currently deployed on their
service. Soon they would return, and the Mantle would leave this forsaken place behind forever.
BROTHER CIAUS DIED first.
The walls folded in on themselves, revealing rows of teeth lining the inside of a vast bristling throat.
Caius had been the slowest to react. The rest of the squad threw themselves into the alcoves along the
tunnel, which each contained statues of Space Marines with their armour covered in the ornate chalice of
the Soul Drinkers. Caius’s leg had snagged on the spikes and he had been dragged down the throat as it
rippled and constricted, the sound of grinding stone competing with the tearing muscle and bone.
Caius did not scream. Perhaps he did not want to show weakness in his final moments. Perhaps he
did not have time. When the corridor reformed, Caius’s vermillion blood ran down the carvings and no
other trace of his body remained.
Borakis hissed with frustration as Caius’s lifesigns winked out on his retinal display.
‘Caius!’ shouted Orfos. ‘Brother! Speak to us!’
‘He is gone, Scout,’ said Borakis.
