Even after he'd slain a fair number of them, Saul Tarvitz was still unable to say with any certainty where the biology of the megarachnid stopped and their technology began. They were the most seamless things, a perfect fusion of artifice and organism. They did not wear their armour or carry their weapons. Their armour was an integument bonded to their arthropod shells, and mey possessed weapons as naturally as a man might own fingers or a mouth. @BRK#Tarvitz loamed mem, and loved them too. He loathed them for their abominable want of human perfection. He loved them because diey were genuinely testing foes, and in mastering them, the Emperor's Children would take another stride closer to attaining their full potential. 'We always need a rival.’ his lord Eidolon had once said, and the words had stuck forever in Tarvitz's mind, 'a true rival, of considerable strength and fortitude. Only against such a rival can our prowess be properly measured.’ @BRK#There was more at stake here than the Legion's prowess, however, and Tarvitz understood that solemnly. Brother Astartes were in trouble, and this was a mission - though no one had dared actually use the term - of rescue. It was thoroughly improper to openly suggest that the Blood Angels needed rescuing. @BRK#Reinforcement. @BRK#That was the word they had been told to use, but it was hard to reinforce what you could not find. They had been on the surface of Murder for sixty-six hours, and had found no sign of the 140th Expedition forces. @BRK#Or even, for the most part, of each other. @BRK#Lord Commander Eidolon had committed the entire company to the surface drop. The descent had been foul, worse than the warnings they had been given prior to the drop, and the warnings had been grim enough. Nightmarish atmospherics had scattered their drop pods like chaff, casting them wildly astray from their projected landing vectors. Tarvitz knew it was likely many pods hadn't even made it to the ground intact. He found himself one of two captains in charge of just over thirty men, around one third of the company force, and all that had been able to regroup after planetfall. Due to the storm-cover, they couldn't raise the fleet in orbit, nor could they raise Eidolon or any other part of the landing force. @BRK#Presuming Eidolon and any other part of the landing force had survived. @BRK#The whole situation smacked of abject failure, and failure was not a concept the Emperor's Children cared to entertain. To turn failure into something else, there was little choice but to get on with the remit of the undertaking, so they spread out in a search pattern to find the brothers they had come to help. On the way, perhaps, they might reunite with other elements of their scattered force, or even find some geographical frame of reference. @BRK#The dropsite environs was disconcerting. Under an enamel-white sky, fizzling and blemished by the megarachnid shield-storms, the land was an undulating plain of ferrous red dust from which a sea of gigantic grass stalks grew, grey-white like dirty ice. Each stalk, as thick as a man's plated thigh, rose up straight to a height of twenty metres: tough, dry and bristly. They swished gently in the radioactive wind, but such was their size, at ground level, the air was filled with the creaking, moaning sound of their structures in motion. The Astartes moved through the groaning forest of stalks like lice in a wheatfield. @BRK#There was precious little lateral visibility. High above their heads, the nodding vertical shoots soared upwards and pointed incriminatingly at the curdled glare of the sky. Around them, the stalks had grown so close together that a man could see only a few metres in any direction. @BRK#The bases of most of the grass stalks were thick with swollen, black larvae: sack-things the size of a man's head, clustered tumorously to the metre or so of stalk closest to the ground. The larvae did nothing but cling and, presumably, drink. As they did so, they made a weird hissing, whistling noise that added to the eerie acoustics of the forest floor. @BRK#Bulk had suggested that the larvae might be infant forms of the enemy, and for the first few hours, they had systematically destroyed all they'd found with flamers and blades, but the work was wearying and unending. There were larvae everywhere, and eventually they had chosen to forget it and ignore the hissing sacks. Besides, the fetid ichor that burst from the larvae when they were struck was damaging the edges of their weapons and scarring their armour where it splashed. @BRK#Lucius, Tarvitz's fellow captain, had found the first tree, and called them all close to inspect it. It was a curious @BRK#thing, apparently made of a calcined white stone, and it dwarfed the surrounding sea of stalks. It was shaped like a wide-capped mushroom: a fifty-metre dome supported on a thick, squat trunk ten metres broad. The dome was an intricate hemisphere of sharp, bone-white thorns, tangled and sharply pointed, the barbs some two or three metres in length. @BRK#What is it for?' Tarvitz wondered. @BRK#'It's not for anything.’ Lucius replied. 'It's a tree. It has no purpose.' @BRK#In that, Lucius was wrong. @BRK#Lucius was younger than Tarvitz, though they were both old enough to have seen many wonders in their lives. They were friends, except that the balance of their friendship was steeply and invisibly weighted in one direction. Saul and Lucius represented the bipolar aspect of their Legion. Like all of the Emperor's Children, they devoted themselves to the pursuit of martial perfection, but Saul was diligently grounded where Lucius was ambitious. @BRK#Saul Tarvitz had long since realised that Lucius would one day outstrip him in honour and rank. Lucius would perhaps become a lord commander in due course, part of the aloof inner circle at the Legion's traditionally hierarchical core. Tarvitz didn't care. He was a file officer, born to the line, and had no desire for elevation. He was content to glorify the primarch and the Emperor, beloved of all, by knowing his place, and keeping it with unstinting devotion. @BRK#Lucius mocked him playfully sometimes, claiming Tarvitz courted the common ranks because he couldn't win the respect of the officers. Tarvitz always laughed that off, because he knew Lucius didn't properly understand. Saul Tarvitz followed the code exactly, and took pride in that. He knew his perfect destiny was as a file officer. To crave more would have been overweening @BRK#and imperfect. Tarvitz had standards, and despised anyone who cast their own standards aside in the hunt for inappropriate goals. @BRK#It was all about purity not superiority. That's what the other Legions always failed to understand. @BRK#Barely fifteen minutes after the discovery of the tree -the first of many they would find scattered throughout the creaking grasslands - they had their first dealings with the megarachnid. @BRK#The enemy's arrival had been announced by three signs: the larvae nearby had suddenly stopped hissing; the towering grass stalks had begun an abrupt shivering vibration, as if electrified; then the Astartes had heard a strange, chittering noise, coming closer. @BRK#Tarvitz barely saw the enemy warriors during that first clash. They had come, thrilling and clattering, out of the grass forest, moving so fast they were silver blurs. The fight lasted twelve chaotic seconds, a period filled to capacity with gunshots and shouts, and odd, weighty impacts. Then the enemy had vanished again, as fast as they had come, the stalks had stilled, and the larvae had resumed their hissing. @BRK#'Did you see them?' asked Kercort, reloading his bolter. @BRK#'I saw something...' Tarvitz admitted, doing the same. @BRK#'Durellen's dead. So is Martius.’ Lucius announced casually, approaching them with something in his hand. @BRK#Tarvitz couldn't quite believe what he had been told. They're dead? Just... dead?' he asked Lucius. The fight surely hadn't lasted long enough to have included the passing of two veteran Astartes. @BRK#'Dead.’ nodded Lucius. "You can look upon their cadavers if you wish. They're over mere. They were too slow.' @BRK#Weapon raised, Tarvitz pushed through the swaying stalks, some of them broken and snapped over by frantic @BRK#bolter fire. He saw the two bodies, tangled amid fallen white shoots on the red earth, their beautiful purple and gold armour sawn apart and running with blood. @BRK#Dismayed, he looked away from the butchery. 'Find Varras.’ he told Kercort, and the man went off to locate the apothecary. @BRK#'Did we kill anything?' Bulle asked. @BRK#'I hit something,' Lucius said proudly, 'but I cannot find the body. It left this behind.’ He held out the thing in his hand. @BRK#It was a limb, or part of a limb. Long, slender, hard. The main part of it, a metre long, was a gently curved blade, apparently made of brushed zinc or galvanised iron. It came to an astonishingly sharp point. It was thin, no thicker than a grown man's wrist. The long blade ended in a widening joint, which attached it to a thicker limb section. This part was also armoured with mottled grey metal, but came to an abrupt end where Lucius's shot had blown it off. The broken end, in cross-section, revealed a skin of metal surrounding a sleeve of natural, arthropoid chitin around an inner mass of pink, wet meat. @BRK#'Is it an arm?' Bulle asked. @BRK#'It's a sword.’ Katz corrected. @BRK#'A sword with a joint?' Bulle snorted. 'And meat inside?' @BRK#Lucius grasped the limb, just above the joint, and brandished it like a sabre. He swung it at the nearest stalk, and it went clean through. With a lingering crash, the massive dry shoot toppled over, tearing into others as it fell. @BRK#Lucius started laughing, then he cried out in pain and dropped the limb. Even the base part of the limb, above the joint, had an edge, and it was so sharp that the force of his grip had bitten through his gauntlet. @BRK#'It has cut me.’ Lucius complained, poking at his ruptured glove. @BRK#Tarvitz looked down at the limb, bent and still on the red soil. 'Little wonder they can slice us to ribbons.’ @BRK#Half an hour later, when the stalks shivered again, Tarvitz met his first megarachnid face to face. He killed it, but it was a close-run thing, over in a couple of seconds. @BRK#From that encounter, Saul Tarvitz began to understand why Khitas Frome had named the world Murder. @BRK#The great warship exploded like a breaching whale from the smudge of un-light that was its retranslation point, and returned to the silent, physical cosmos of real space again with a shivering impact. It had translated twelve weeks earlier, by the ship-board clocks, and had made a journey that ought to have taken eighteen weeks. Great powers had been put into play to expedite the transit, powers that only a Warmaster could call upon. @BRK#It coasted for about six million kilometres, trailing the last, luminous tendrils of plasmic flare from its immense bulk, like remorae, until strobing flashes of un-light to stern announced the belated arrival of its consorts: ten light cruisers and five mass conveyance troopships. The stragglers lit their real space engines and hurried wearily to join formation with the huge flagship. As they approached, like a school of pups swimming close to their mighty parent, the flagship ignited its own drives and led them in. @BRK#Towards One Forty Twenty. Towards Murder. @BRK#Forward arrayed detectors pinged as they tasted the magnetic and energetic profiles of other ships at high anchor around the system's fourth planet, eighty million kilometres ahead. The local sun was yellow and hot, and billowed with loud, charged particles. @BRK#As it advanced at the head of the trailing flotilla, the flagship broadcast its standard greeting document, in @BRK#vox, vox-supplemented pict, War Council code, and astrotelepathic forms. @BRK#This is the @BRK#Vengeful Spirit, @BRK#of the 63rd Expedition. This vessel approaches with peaceful intent, as an ambassador of the Imperium of Man. House your guns and stand to. Make acknowledgement.' @BRK#On the bridge of the @BRK#Vengeful Spirit, @BRK#Master Com-nenus sat at his station and waited. Given its great size and number of personnel, the bridge around him was curiously quiet. There was just a murmur of low voices and the whir of instrumentation. The ship itself was protesting loudly. Undignified creaks and seismic moans issued from its immense hull and layered decks as the superstructure relaxed and settled from the horrendous torsion stresses of warp translation. @BRK#Boas Comnenus knew most of the sounds like old friends, and could almost anticipate them. He'd been part of the ship for a long time, and knew it as intimately as a lover's body. He waited, braced, for erroneous creaks, for the sudden chime of defect alarms. @BRK#So far, all was well. He glanced at the Master Companion of Vox, who shook his head. He switched his gaze to Ing Mae Sing who, though blind, knew full well he was looking at her. @BRK#'No response, master.’ she said. @BRK#'Repeat.’ he ordered. He wanted that signal response, but more particularly, he was waiting for the fix. It was taking too long. Comnenus drummed his steel fingers on the edge of his master console, and deck officers all around him stiffened. They knew, and feared, that sign of impatience. @BRK#Finally, an adjutant hurried over from the navigation pit with the wafer slip. The adjutant might have been about to apologise for the delay, but Comnenus glanced up at him with a whir of augmetic lenses. The whir said, @BRK#'I do not expect you to speak.’ The adjutant simply held the wafer out for inspection. @BRK#Comnenus read it, nodded, and handed it back. @BRK#'Make it known and recorded.’ he said. The adjutant paused long enough for another deck officer to copy the wafer for the principal transit log, then hurried up the rear staircase of the bridge to the strategium deck. There, with a salute, he handed it to the duty master, who took it, turned, and walked twenty paces to the plated glass doors of the sanctum, where he handed it in turn to the master bodyguard. The master bodyguard, a massive Astartes in gold custodes armour, read the wafer quickly, nodded, and opened the doors. He passed the wafer to the solemn, robed figure of Maloghurst, who was waiting just inside. @BRK#Maloghurst read the wafer too, nodded in turn, and shut the doors again. @BRK#'Location is confirmed and entered into the log.’ Maloghurst announced to the sanctum. 'One Forty Twenty.’ @BRK#Seated in a high-backed chair that had been drawn up close to the window ports to afford a better view of the starfield outside, the Warmaster took a deep, steady breath. 'Determination of passage so noted.’ he replied. 'Let my acknowledgement be a matter of record.’ The twenty waiting scribes around him scratched the details down in their manifests, bowed and withdrew. @BRK#'Maloghurst?' The Warmaster turned his head to look at his equerry. 'Send Boas my compliments, please.’ @BRK#Yes, lord.’ @BRK#The Warmaster rose to his feet. He was dressed in full ceremonial wargear, gleaming gold and frost white, with a vast mantle of purple scale-skin draped across his shoulders. The eye of Terra stared from his breastplate. He turned to face the ten Astartes officers gathered in the centre of the room, and each one of them felt that the eye was regarding him with particular, unblinking scrutiny. @BRK#'We @BRK#await your orders, lord.’ said Abaddon. Like the other nine, he was wearing batde plate with a floor length cloak, his crested helm carried in the crook of his left arm. @BRK#'And we're where we're supposed to be.’ said Torgad-don, 'and alive, which is always a good start.’ @BRK#A broad smile crossed the Warmaster's face. 'Indeed it is, Tarik.’ He looked into the eyes of each officer in turn. 'My friends, it seems we have an alien war to contest. This pleases me. Proud as I am of our accomplishments on Sixty-Three Nineteen, that was a painful fight to prosecute. I can't derive satisfaction from a victory over our own kind, no matter how wrong-headed and stubborn their philosophies. It limits the soldier in me, and inhibits my relish of war, and we are all warriors, you and I. Made for combat. Bred, trained and disciplined. Except you pair.’ Horus smirked, nodding at Abaddon and Luc Sedirae. "You kill until I have to tell you to stop.’ @BRK#'And even then you have to raise your voice.’ added Torgaddon. Most of them laughed. @BRK#'So an alien war is a delight to me.’ the Warmaster continued, still smiling. 'A clear and simple foe. An opportunity to wage war without restraint, regret or remorse. Let us go and be warriors for a while, pure and undiluted.’ @BRK#'Hear, hear!' cried the ancient Iacton Qruze, businesslike and sober, clearly bothered by Torgaddon's constant levity. The other nine were more modest in their assent. @BRK#Horus led them out of the sanctum onto the strate-gium deck, the four captains of the Mournival and the company commanders: Sedirae of the Thirteenth, Qruze of the Third, Targost of the Seventh, Marr of the Eighteenth, Moy of the Nineteenth, and Goshen of the Twenty-Fifth. @BRK#'Let's have tactical.’ the Warmaster said. @BRK#Maloghurst was waiting, ready. As he motioned with his control wand, detailed hololithic images shimmered into place above the dais. They showed a general profile of the system, with orbital paths delineated, and the position and motion of tracked vessels. Horus gazed up at the hololithic graphics and reached out. Actuator sensors built into the fingertips of his gaundets allowed him to rotate the hololithic display and bring certain segments into magnification. Twenty-nine craft.’ he said. 'I thought the 140th was eighteen vessels strong?' @BRK#'So we were told, lord.’ Maloghurst replied. As soon as mey had stepped out of the sanctum, they had started conversing in Cthonic, so as to preserve tactical confidence whilst in earshot of the bridge personnel. Though Horus had not been raised on Cthonia - uncommonly, for a primarch, he had not matured on the cradle-world of his Legion - he spoke it fluently. In fact, he spoke it with the particular hard palatal edge and rough vowels of a Western Hemispheric ganger, the commonest and roughest of Cthonia's feral castes. It had always amused Loken to hear that accent. Early on, he had assumed it was because that's how the Warmaster had learned it, from just such a speaker, but he doubted that now. Horus never did anything by accident. Loken believed that the Warmaster's rough Cthonic accent was a deliberate affectation so that he would seem, to the men, as honest and low-born as any of them. @BRK#Maloghurst had consulted a data-slate provided by a waiting deck officer. 'I confirm the 140th Expedition was given a complement of eighteen vessels.’ @BRK#Then what are these others?' asked Aximand. 'Enemy ships?' @BRK#We're awaiting sensor profile analysis, captain.’ Maloghurst replied, 'and there has been no response to our signals as yet.’ @BRK#Tell Master Comnenus to be... more emphatic.’ the Warmaster told his equerry. @BRK#'Should I instruct him to form our components into a battle line, lord?' Maloghurst asked. @BRK#'I'll consider it.’ the Warmaster said. Maloghurst limped away down the platform steps onto the main bridge to speak to Boas Comnenus. @BRK#'Should we form a battle line?' Horus asked his commanders. @BRK#'Could the additional profiles be alien vessels?' Qruze wondered. @BRK#'It doesn't look like a battle spread, Iacton.’ Aximand replied, 'and Frame said nothing about enemy vessels.’ @BRK#They're ours.’ said Loken. @BRK#The Warmaster looked over at him. You think so, Garviel?' @BRK#'It seems evident to me, sir. The hits show a spread of ships at high anchor. Imperial anchorage formation. Others must have responded to the call for assistance. Loken trailed off, and suddenly fought back an embarrassed smile, "гаи knew that all along, of course, my lord.’ @BRK#'I was just wondering who else might have been sharp enough to recognise the pattern.’ Horus smiled. Qruze shook his head with a grin, sheepish at his own mistake. @BRK#The Warmaster nodded towards the display. 'So, what's this big fellow here? That's a barge.’ @BRK#The @BRK#Misericord @BRK#7 @BRK#.' @BRK#suggested Qruze. @BRK#'No, no, @BRK#that's @BRK#the @BRK#Misericord. @BRK#And what's @BRK#this @BRK#about?' Horus leaned forwards, and ran his fingers across the hard light display. 'It looks like... music. Something like music. Who's transmitting music?' @BRK#'Outstation relays.’ Abaddon said, studying his own data-slate. 'Beacons. The 140th reported thirty beacons in the system grid. Xenos. Their broadcasts are repeating and untranslatable.’ @BRK#'Really? They have no ships, but they have outstation beacons?' Horus reached out and changed the display @BRK#to @BRK# a close breakdown of scatter patterns. 'This is untranslatable?' @BRK#'So the 140th said.’ said Abaddon. @BRK#'Have we taken their word for that?' asked the War-master. @BRK#'I imagine we have.’ said Abaddon. @BRK#There's sense in this.’ Horus decided, peering at the luminous graphics. 'I want this run. I want us to ran it. Start with standard numeric blocks. With respect to the 140th, I don't intend to take their word for anything. Cursed awful job they've done here so far.’ @BRK#Abaddon nodded, and stepped aside to speak to one of the waiting deck officers and have the order enacted. @BRK#You said it looks like music.’ Loken said. @BRK#'What?' @BRK#You said it looks like music, sir.’ Loken repeated. 'An interesting word to choose.’ @BRK#The Warmaster shrugged. 'It's mathematical, but there's a sequential rhythm to it. It's not random. Music and maths, Garviel. Two sides of a coin. This is deliberately structured. Lord knows which idiot in the 140th Fleet decided this was untranslatable.’ @BRK#Loken nodded. You see that, just by looking at it?' he asked. @BRK#'Isn't it obvious?' Horus replied. @BRK#Maloghurst returned. 'Master Comnenus confirms all contacts are Imperial.’ he said, holding out another wafer slip of print out. 'Other units have been arriving these last few weeks, in response to the calls for aid. Most of them are Imperial army conveyances en route to Carollis Star, but the big vessel is the @BRK#Proudheart. @BRK#Third Legion, the Emperor's Children. A full company, under the command privilege of Lord Commander Eidolon.’ @BRK#'So, they beat us to it. How are they doing?' Maloghurst shrugged. 'It would seem... not well, lord.’ he said. @BRK#The planet's official designation in the Imperial Registry was One Hundred and Forty Twenty, it being the twentieth world subjected to compliance by the fleet of the 140th Expedition. But that was inaccurate, as clearly the 140th had not achieved anything like compliance. Still, the Emperor's Children had used the number to begin with, for to do otherwise would have been an insult to the honour of the Blood Angels. @BRK#Prior to arrival, Lord Commander Eidolon had briefed his Astartes comprehensively. The initial transmissions of the 140th Expedition had been clear and succinct. Khitas Frome, Captain of the three Blood Angels companies that formed the marrow of the 140th, had reported xenos hostilities a few days after his forces had touched down on the world's surface. He had described 'very capable things, like upright beedes, but made of, or shod in, metal. Each one is twice the height of a man and very belligerent. Assistance may be required if their numbers increase.' @BRK#After that, his relayed communiques had been somewhat patchy and intermittent. Fighting had 'grown thicker and more savage' and the xenos forms 'appeared not to lack in numbers'. A week later, and his transmissions were more urgent. There is a race here that resists us, and which we cannot easily overcome. They refuse to admit communication with us, or any parlay. They spill from their lairs. I find myself admiring their mettle, though they are not made as we are. Their martial schooling is fine indeed. A worthy foe, one that might be written about in our annals.’ @BRK#A week after that, the expedition's messages had become rather more simple, sent by the Master of the @BRK#Fleet instead of Frome. The enemy here is formidable, and quite outweighs us. To take this world, the full force of the Legio is required. We humbly submit a request for reinforcement at this time.' @BRK#Frome's last message, relayed from the surface a fortnight later by the expedition fleet, had been a tinny rasp of generally indecipherable noise. All the articulacy and purpose of his words had been torn apart by the feral distortion. The only cogent thing that had come through was his final utterance. Each word had seemed to be spoken with inhuman effort. This. World. Is. Murder.' And so they had named it. @BRK#The taskforce of the Emperor's Children was comparatively small in size: just a company of the Legion's main strength, conveyed by the battle-barge @BRK#Proud-heart, @BRK#under the command of Lord Eidolon. After a brief, peace-keeping tour of newly compliant worlds in the Satyr Lanxus Belt, they had been en route to rejoin their primarch and brethren companies at Carollis Star to begin a mass advance into the Lesser Bifold Cluster. However, during their transit, the 140th Expedition had begun its requests for assistance. The taskforce had been the closest Imperial unit fit to respond. Lord Eidolon had requested immediate permission from his primarch to alter course and go to the expedition's aid. @BRK#Fulgrim had given his authority at once. The Emperor's Children would never leave their Astartes brothers in jeopardy. Eidolon had been given his pri-march's instant, unreserved blessing to reroute and support the beleaguered expedition. Other forces were rushing to assist. It was said a detachment of Blood Angels was on its way, as was a heavyweight response from the Warmaster himself, despatched from the 63rd Expedition. @BRK#At best, the closest of them was still many days off. Lord Eidolon's taskforce was the interim measure: critical response, the first to the scene. @BRK#Eidolon's battle-barge had joined with the operational vessels of the 140th Expedition at high anchor above One Forty Twenty. The 140th Expedition was a small, compact force of eighteen carriers, mass conveyances and escorts supporting the noble battle-barge @BRK#Misericord. @BRK#Its martial composition was three companies of Blood Angels under Captain Frome, and four thousand men of the Imperial army, with allied armour, but no Mechanicum force. @BRK#Mathanual August, Master of the 140th Fleet, had welcomed Eidolon and his commanders aboard the barge. Tall and slender, with a forked white beard, August was fretful and nervous. 'I am gratified at your quick response, lord.’ he'd told Eidolon. @BRK#Where is Frome?' Eidolon had asked bluntly. @BRK#August had shrugged, helplessly. @BRK#"Where is the commander of the army divisions?' @BRK#A second pitiful shrug. They are all down there.’ @BRK#Down there. On Murder. The world was a hazy, grey orb, mottled with storm patterning in the atmosphere. Drawn to the lonely system by the curious, untranslatable broadcasts of the outstation beacons, a clear and manifest trace of sentient life, the 140th Expedition had focussed its attentions on the fourth planet, the only orb in the star's orbit with an atmosphere. Sensor sweeps had detected abundant vital traces, though nothing had answered their signals. @BRK#Fifty Blood Angels had dropped first, in landers, and had simply disappeared. Previously calm weather cycles had mutated into violent tempests the moment the landers had entered the atmosphere, like an allergic reaction, and swallowed them up. Due to the suddenly volatile climate, communication with the surface was @BRK#impossible. Another fifty had followed, and had similarly vanished. @BRK#That was when Frome and the fleet officers had begun to suspect that the life forms of One Forty Twenty somehow commanded their own weather systems as a defence. The immense storm fronts, later dubbed 'shield-storms', that had risen up to meet the surface-bound landers, had probably obliterated them. After that, Frome had used drop-pods, the only vehicles that seemed to survive the descent. Frome had led the third wave himself, and only partial messages had been received from him subsequently, even though he'd taken an astrotelepath with him to counter the climatic vox-interference. @BRK#It was a grim story. Section by section, August had committed the Astartes and army forces in his expedition to surface drops in a vain attempt to respond to Frame's broken pleas for support. They had either been destroyed by the storms or lost in the impenetrable maelstrom below. The shield-storms, once roused, would not die away. There were no clean surface picts, no decent topographic scans, no uplinks or viable communication lines. One Forty Twenty was an abyss from which no one returned. @BRK#'We'll be going in blind.’ Eidolon had told his officers. 'Drop-pod descent.’ @BRK#'Perhaps you should wait, lord.’ August had suggested. "We have word that a Blood Angels force is en route to relieve Captain Frome, and the Luna Wolves are but four days away. Combined, perhaps, you might better-' @BRK#That had decided it. Tarvitz knew Lord Eidolon had no intention of sharing any glory with the Warmas-ter's elite. His lord was relishing the prospect of demonstrating the excellence of his company, by rescuing the cohorts of a rival Legion... whether the word 'rescuing' was used or not. The nature of the @BRK#deed, and the comparisons that it made, would speak for themselves. Eidolon had sanctioned the drop immediately. @BRK#TWO @BRK#The nature of the enemy @BRK#A trace @BRK#The purpose of trees @BRK#The megarachnid warriors were three metres tall, and possessed eight limbs. They ambulated, with dazzling speed, on their four hindmost limbs, and used the other four as weapons. Their bodies, one third again as weighty and massive as a human's, were segmented like an insect's: a small, compact abdomen hung between the four, wide-spread, slender walking limbs; a massive, armoured thorax from which all eight limbs depended; and a squat, wide, wedge-shaped head, equipped with short, rattling mouthparts that issued the characteristic chittering noise, a heavy, ctenoid comb of brow armour, and no discernible eyes. The four upper limbs matched the trophy Lucius had taken in the first round: metal-cased blades over a metre in length beyond the joint. Every part of the megarachnid appeared to be thickly plated with mottled, almost fibrous grey armour, except the head crests, which seemed to be natural, chitinous growths, rough, bony and ivory. @BRK#As the fighting wore on, Tarvitz thought he identified a status in those crests. The fuller the chitin growths, the more senior - and larger - the warrior. @BRK#Tarvitz made his first kill with his bolter. The megarachnid lunged out of the suddenly vibrating stalks in front of them, and decapitated Kercort with a flick of its upper left blade. Even stationary, it was a hyperactive blur, as if its metabolism, its very life, moved at some rate far faster than that of the enhanced gene-seed warriors of Chemos. Tarvitz had opened fire, denting the centre line of the megarachnid's thorax armour with three shots, before his fourth obliterated the thing's head in a shower of white paste and ivory crest shards. Its legs stumbled and scrabbled, its blade arms waved, and then it fell, but just before it did, there was another crash. @BRK#The crash was the sound of Kercort's headless body finally hitting the red dust, arterial spray jetting from his severed neck. @BRK#That was how fast the encounter had passed. From first strike to clean kill, poor Kercort had only had time to fall down. @BRK#A second megarachnid appeared behind the first. Its flickering limbs had torn Tarvitz's bolter out of his hands, and set a deep gouge across the facing of his breastplate, right across the Imperial aquila displayed there. That was a great crime. Alone amongst the Legions, only the Emperor's Children had been permitted, by the grace of the Emperor himself, to wear the aquila on their chestplates. Backing away, hearing bolter fire and yells from the shivering thickets all around him, Tarvitz had felt stung by genuine insult, and had unslung his broadsword, powered it, and struck downwards with a two-handed cut. His long, heavy blade had glanced off the alien's headcrest, chipping off flecks of yellowish bone, and Tarvitz had been @BRK#forced to dance back out of the reach of the four, slicing limb-blades. @BRK#His second strike had been better. His sword missed the bone crest and instead hacked deeply into the megarachnid's neck, at the joint where the head connected to the upper thorax. He had split the thorax wide open to the centre, squirting out a gush of glistening white ichor. The megarachnid had trembled, fidgeting, slowly understanding its own death as Tarvitz wrenched his blade back out. It took a moment to die. It reached out with its quivering blade-limbs, and touched the tips of them against Tarvitz's recoiling face, two on either side of the visor. The touch was almost gentle. As it fell, the four points made a shrieking sound as they dragged backwards across the sides of his visor, leaving bare metal scratches in the purple gloss. @BRK#Someone was screaming. A bolter was firing on full auto, and debris from exploded grass stalks was spilling up into the air. @BRK#A third hostile flickered at Tarvitz, but his blood was up. He swung at it, turning his body right around, and cut clean through the mid line of the thorax, between upper arms and lower legs. @BRK#Pale liquid spattered into the air, and the top of the alien fell away. The abdomen, and the half-thorax remaining, pumping milky fluid, continued to scurry on its four legs for a moment before it collided with a grass stalk and toppled over. @BRK#And that was the fight done. The stalks ceased their shivering, and the wretched grubs started to whistle and buzz again. @BRK#When they had been on the ground for ninety hours, and had engaged with the megarachnid twenty-eight times in the dense thickets of the grass forests, seven of their meagre party were dead and gone. The process of @BRK#advance became mechanical, almost trance-like. There was no guiding narrative, no strategic detail. They had established no contact with the Blood Angels, or their lord, or any segments of other sections of their company. They moved forwards, and every few kilometres fighting broke out. @BRK#This was an almost perfect war, Saul Tarvitz decided. Simple and engrossing, testing their combat skills and physical prowess to destruction. It was like a training regime made lethal. Only days afterwards did he appreciate how truly focussed he had become during the undertaking. His instincts had grown as sharp as the enemy limb-blades. He was on guard at all times, with no opportunity to slacken or lose concentration, for the megarachnid ambushes were sudden and ferocious, and came out of nowhere. The party moved, then fought, moved, then fought, without space for rest or reflection. Tarvitz had never known, and would never know again, such pure martial perfection, utterly uncomplicated by politics or beliefs. He and his fellows were weapons of the Emperor, and the megarachnid were the unqualified quintessence of the hostile cosmos that stood in man's way. @BRK#Almost all of the gradually dwindling Astartes had switched to their blades. It took too many bolter rounds to bring a megarachnid down. A blade was surer, provided one was quick enough to get the first stroke in, and strong enough to ensure that stroke was a killing blow. @BRK#It was with some surprise that Tarvitz discovered his fellow captain, Lucius, thought differenuy. As they pushed on, Lucius boasted that he was playing the enemy. @BRK#'It's like duelling with four swordsmen at once,' Lucius crowed. Lucius was a bladesman. To Tarvitz's knowledge, Lucius had never been bested in swordplay Where Tarvitz, and men like him, rotated through weapon drills to extend perfection in all forms and manners, @BRK#Lucius had made a single art of the sword. Frustratingly, his firearms skill was such that he never seemed to need to hone it on the ranges. It was Lucius's proudest claim to have 'personally worn out' four practice cages. Sometimes, the Legion's other sword-masters, warriors like Ekhelon and Brazenor, sparred with Lucius to improve their technique. It was said, Eidolon himself often chose Lucius as a training partner. @BRK#Lucius carried an antique long sword, a relic of the Unification Wars, forged in the smithies of the Urals by artisans of the Terrawatt Clan. It was a masterpiece of perfect balance and temper. Usually, he fought with it in the old style, with a combat shield locked to his left arm. The sword's wire-wound handle was unusually long, enabling him to change from a single to a double grip, to spin the blade one-handed like a baton, and to slide the pressure of his grip back and forth: back for a looping swing, forwards for a taut, focussed thrust. @BRK#He had his shield strapped across his back, and carried the megarachnid blade-limb in his left hand as a secondary sword. He had bound the base of the severed limb with strips of steel paper from the liner of his shield to prevent the edge from further harming his grip. Head low, he paced forwards through the endless avenues of stalks, hungry for any opportunity to deal death. @BRK#During the twelfth attack, Tarvitz witnessed Lucius at work for the first time. Lucius met a megarachnid head on, and set up a flurry of dazzling, ringing blows, his two blades against the creature's four. Tarvitz saw three opportunities for straight kill strokes that Lucius didn't so much miss as choose not to take. He was enjoying himself so much that he didn't want the game to end too soon. @BRK#'We will take one or two alive later.’ he told Tarvitz after the fight, without a hint of irony. 'I will chain them in the practice cages. They will be useful for sparring.’ @BRK#They are xenos.’ Tarvitz scolded. @BRK#'If I am going to improve at all, I need decent practice. Practice mat will test me. Do you know of a man who could push me?' @BRK#They are xenos.’ Tarvitz said again. @BRK#'Perhaps it is the Emperor's will.’ Lucius suggested. 'Perhaps these things have been placed in the cosmos to improve our war skills.’ @BRK#Tarvitz was proud that he didn't even begin to understand how xenos minds worked, but he was also confident that the purpose of the megarachnid, if they had some higher, ineffable purpose, was more than to give mankind a demanding training partner. He wondered, briefly, if they had language, or culture, culture as a man might recognise it. Art? Science? Emotion? Or were those things as seamlessly and exotically bonded into them as their technologies, so that mortal man might not differentiate or identify them? @BRK#Were they driven by some emotive cause to attack the Emperor's Children, or were they simply responding to trespass, like a mound of drone insects prodded with a stick? It occurred to him that the megarachnid might be attacking because, to them, the humans were hideous and xenos. @BRK#It was a terrible thought. Surely the megarachnid could see the superiority of the human design compared with their own? Maybe they fought because of jealousy? @BRK#Lucius was busy droning on, delightedly explaining some new finesse of wrist-turn that fighting the megarachnid had already taught him. He was demonstrating the technique against the bole of a stalk. @BRK#'See? A lift and turn. Lift and turn. The blow comes down and in. It would be of no purpose against a man, but here it is essential. I think I will compose a treatise on it. The move should be called "the Lucius", don't you think? How fine does that sound?' @BRK#Very fine.’ Tarvitz replied. @BRK#'Here is something!' a voice exclaimed over the vox. It was Sakian. They hurried to him. He had found a sudden and surprising clearing in the grass forest. The stalks had stopped, exposing a broad field of bare, red earth many kilometres square. @BRK#'What is this?' asked Bulle. @BRK#Tarvitz wondered if the space had been deliberately cleared, but there was no sign that stalks had ever sprouted there. The tall, swishing forest surrounded the area on all sides. @BRK#One by one, the Astartes stepped out into the open. It was unsettling. Moving through the grass forest, there had been precious little sense of going anywhere, because everywhere looked the same. This gap was suddenly a landmark. A disconcerting difference. @BRK#'Look here.’ Sakian called. He was twenty metres out in the barren plain, kneeling to examine something. Tarvitz realised he had called out because of something more specific than the change in environs. @BRK#'What is it?' Tarvitz asked, trudging forwards to join Sakian. @BRK#'I think I know, captain.’ Sakian replied, 'but I don't like to say it. I saw it here on the ground.’ @BRK#Sakian held the object out so that Tarvitz could inspect it. @BRK#It was a vaguely triangular, vaguely concave piece of tinted glass, with rounded corners, roughly nine centimetres on its longest side. Its edges were lipped, and machine formed. Tarvitz knew what it was at once, because he was staring at it through two similar objects. @BRK#It was a visor lens from an Astartes helmet. What manner of force could have popped it out of its ceramite frame? @BRK#'It's what you think it is.’ Tarvitz told Sakian. @BRK#'Not one of ours.’ @BRK#'No. I don't think so. The shape is wrong. This is Mark III.’ @BRK#The Blood Angels, then?' @BRK#Yes. The Blood Angels.’ The first physical proof that anyone had been here before them. @BRK#'Look around!' Tarvitz ordered to the others. 'Search the dirt!' @BRK#The troop spent ten minutes searching. Nothing else was discovered. Overhead, an especially fierce shield-storm had begun to close in, as if drawn to them. Furious ripples of lightning striated the heavy clouds. The light grew yellow, and the storm's distortions whined and shrieked intrusively into their vox-links. @BRK#'We're exposed out here.’ Bulle muttered. 'Let's get back into the forest.’ @BRK#Tarvitz was amused. Bulle made it sound as if the stalk thickets were safe ground. @BRK#Giant forks of lightning, savage and yellow-white phosphorescent, were searing down into the open space, explosively scorching the earth. Though each fork only existed for a nanosecond, they seemed solid and real, like fundamental, physical structures, like upturned, thorny trees. Three Astartes, including Lucius, were struck. Secure in their Mark IV plate, they shrugged off the massive, detonating impacts and laughed as aftershock electrical blooms crackled like garlands of blue wire around their armour for a few seconds. @BRK#'Bulle's right.’ Lucius said, his vox signal temporarily mauled by the discharge dissipating from his suit. 'I want to go back into the forest. I want to hunt. I haven't killed anything in twenty minutes.’ @BRK#Several of the men around roared their approval at Lucius's wilfully belligerent pronouncement. They slapped their fists against their shields. @BRK#Tarvitz had been trying to contact Lord Eidolon again, or anyone else, but the storm was still blocking him. He @BRK#was concerned that the few of them still remaining should not separate, but Lucius's bravado had annoyed @BRK#him. @BRK#'Do as you see fit, captain. I want to find out what that is.’ he said to Lucius, petulantly. He pointed. On the far side of the cleared space, three or four kilometres away, he could make out large white blobs in the far thickets. @BRK#'More trees.’ Lucius said. @BRK#Yes, but-' @BRK#'Oh, very well.’ Lucius conceded. @BRK#There were now just twenty-two warriors in the group led by Lucius and Tarvitz. They spread out in a loose line and began to cross the open space. The clearing, at least, afforded them time to see any megarachnid approach. @BRK#The storm above grew still more ferocious. Five more men were struck. One of them, Ulzoras, was actually knocked off his feet. They saw fused, glassy craters in the ground where lightning had earthed with the force of penetrator missiles. The shield-storm seemed to be pressing down on them, like a lid across the sky, pressurising the air, and squeezing them in an atmospheric vice. @BRK#When the megarachnid appeared, they showed themselves in ones or twos at first. Katz saw them initially, and called out. The grey things were milling in and out of the edges of the stalk forest. Then they began to emerge en masse and move across the open ground towards the Astartes war party. @BRK#Terra!' Lucius clucked. @BRK#'Now @BRK#we have a battle.’ @BRK#There were more than a hundred of the aliens. Cluttering, they closed on the Astartes from all sides, an accelerating ring of onrushing grey, closing faster and faster, a blur of scurrying limbs. @BRK#'Form a ring.’ Tarvitz instructed calmly. 'Bolters.’ He stuck his broadsword, tip down, into the red earth @BRK#beside him and unslung his firearm. Odiers did likewise. Tarvitz noticed that Lucius kept his grip on his paired blades. @BRK#The flood of megarachnid swallowed up the ground, and closed in a concentric ring around the circle of the Emperor's Children. @BRK#'Ready yourselves.’ Tarvitz called. Lucius, his swords raised by his sides, was evidently happy for Tarvitz to command the action. @BRK#They could hear the dry, febrile chittering as it came closer. The drumming of four hundred rapid legs. @BRK#Tarvitz nodded to Bulle, who was the best marksman in the troop. The order is yours.’ he said. @BRK#Thank you, sir.’ Bulle raised his bolter and yelled, 'At ten metres! Shoot till you're dry!' @BRK#Then blades!' Tarvitz bellowed. @BRK#When the tightening wave of megarachnid warriors was ten and a half metres away Bulle yelled, 'Fire!' and the firm circle of Astartes opened up. @BRK#Their weapons made a huge, rolling noise, despite the storm. All around them, the front ranks of the enemy buckled and toppled, some splintering apart, some bursting. Pieces of thorny, zinc-grey metal spun away into the air. @BRK#As Bulle had instructed, the Astartes fired until their weapons were spent, and then hefted their blades up in time to meet the onrushing foe. The megarachnid broke around them like a wave around a rock. There was a flurried, multiplied din of metal-on-metal impacts as human and alien blades clashed. Tarvitz saw Lucius rush forwards at the last minute, swords swinging, meeting the megarachnid host head on, severing and hacking. @BRK#The battle lasted for three minutes. Its intensity should have been spread out across an hour or two. Five more Astartes died. Dozens of megarachnid things fell, @BRK#broken and rent, onto the red earth. Reflecting upon the encounter later, Tarvitz found he could not remember any single detail of the fight. He'd dropped his bolter and raised his broadsword, and then it had all become a smear of bewildering moments. He found himself, standing there, his limbs aching from effort, his sword and armour dripping with stringy, white matter. The megarachnid were falling back, pouring back, as rapidly as they had advanced. @BRK#'Regroup! Reload!' Tarvitz heard himself yelling. @BRK#'Look!' Katz called out. Tarvitz looked. @BRK#There was something in the sky, objects sweeping down out of the molten, fracturing air above them. @BRK#The megarachnid had more than one biological form. @BRK#The flying things descended on long, glassy wings that beat so furiously they were just flickering blurs that made a strident thrumming noise. Their bodies were glossy black, their abdomens much fuller and longer than those of their land-bound cousins. Their slender black legs were pulled up beneath them, like wrought-iron undercarriages. @BRK#The winged dades took men from the air, dropping sharply and seizing armoured forms in the hooked embrace of their dark limbs. Men fought back, straggled, fired their weapons, but within seconds four or five warriors had been snatched up and borne away into the tumultuous sky, writhing and shouting. @BRK#Unit cohesion broke. The men scattered, trying to evade the things swooping out of the air. Tarvitz yelled for order, but knew it was futile. He was forced to duck as a winged shape rushed over him, making a reverber-ative, chopping drone. He caught a glimpse of a head crest formed into a long, dark, malevolent hook. @BRK#Another passed close by. Boltguns were pumping. Tarvitz lashed out with his sword, striking high, trying to drive the creature back. The thrumming of its wings @BRK#was distressingly loud and made his diaphragm quiver. He jabbed and thrust with his blade, and the thing bobbed backwards across the soil, effortless and light. With a sharp, sudden movement, it turned away, took hold of another man, and lifted him into the sky. @BRK#Another of the winged things had seized Lucius. It had him by the back and was taking him off the ground. Lucius, twisting like a maniac, was trying to stab his swords up behind himself, to no avail. @BRK#Tarvitz sprang forwards and grabbed hold of Lucius as he left the ground. Tarvitz thrust up past him with his broadsword, but a hooked black leg struck him, and his broadsword tumbled away out of his hand. He held on to Lucius. @BRK#'Drop! Drop!' Lucius yelled. @BRK#Tarvitz could see that the thing held Lucius by the shield strapped to his back. Swinging, he wrenched out his combat knife, and hacked at the straps. They sheared away, and Lucius and Tarvitz fell from the thing's clutches, plummeting ten metres onto the red dust. @BRK#The flying clades made off, taking nine of the Astartes with them. They were heading in the direction of the white blobs in the far thickets. Tarvitz didn't need to give an order. The remaining warriors took off across the ground as fast as they could, chasing after the retreating dots. @BRK#They caught up with them at the far edge of the clearing. The white blobs had indeed been more trees, three of them, and now Lucius discovered they had a purpose after all. @BRK#The bodies of the taken Astartes were impaled upon the thorns of the trees, rammed onto the stone spikes, their armoured shapes skewered into place, allowing the winged megarachnid to feed upon them. The creatures, their wings now stilled and quiet and extended, long and slender, out behind their bodies like bars of @BRK#stained glass, were crawling over the stone trees, gnawing and biting, using their hooked head crests to break open thorn-pinned armour to get at the meat within. @BRK#Tarvitz and the others came to a halt and watched in sick dismay. Blood was dripping from the white thorns and streaming down the squat, chalky trunks. @BRK#Their brothers were not alone amongst the thorns. Other cadavers hung there, rotten and rendered down to bone and dry gristle. Pieces of red armour plate hung from the reduced bodies, or littered the ground at the foot of the trees. @BRK#At last, they had found out what had happened to the Blood Angels. @BRK#THREE @BRK#During the voyage @BRK#Bad poetry @BRK#Secrets @BRK#During the twelve-week voyage between Sixty-Three Nineteen and One Forty Twenty, Loken had come to the conclusion that Sindermann was avoiding him. @BRK#He finally located him in the endless stacks of Archive Chamber Three. The iterator was sitting in a stilt-chair, examining ancient texts secured on one of the high shelves of the archive's gloomiest back annexes. There was no bustle of activity back here, no hurrying servitors laden with requested books. Loken presumed that the material catalogued in this area was of little interest to the average scholar. @BRK#Sindermann didn't hear him approach. He was intently studying a fragile old manuscript, the stilt-chair's reading lamp tilted over his left shoulder to illuminate the pages. @BRK#'Hello?' Loken hissed. @BRK#Sindermann looked down and saw Loken. He started slightly, as if woken from a deep sleep. @BRK#'Garviel.’ he whispered. 'One moment.' Sindermann put the manuscript back on the shelf, but several other books @BRK#were piled up in the chair's basket rack. As he re-shelved the manuscript, Sindermann's hands seemed to tremble. He pulled a brass lever on the chair's armrest and the stilt legs telescoped down with a breathy hiss until he was at ground level. @BRK#Loken reached out to steady the iterator as he stepped out of the chair. @BRK#Thank you, Garviel.' @BRK#'What are you doing back here?' Loken asked. @BRK#'Oh, you know. Reading.’ @BRK#'Reading what?' @BRK#Sindermann cast what Loken judged to be a slightly guilty look at the books in his chair's rack. Guilty, or embarrassed. 'I confess.’ Sindermann said, 'I have been seeking solace in some old and terribly unfashionable material. Pre-Unification fiction, and some poetry. Just desolate scraps, for so little remains, but I find some comfort in it.’ @BRK#'May I?' Loken asked, gesturing to the basket. @BRK#'Of course.’ said Sindermann. @BRK#Loken sat down in the brass chair, which creaked under his weight, and took some of the old books out of the side basket to examine them. They were frayed and foxed, even though some of them had evidendy been rebound or sleeved from earlier bindings prior to archiving. @BRK#"The Golden Age ofSumaturan Poetry @BRK#7 @BRK#.' @BRK#Loken said. @BRK#'Folk Tales of Old Muscovy @BRK#7 @BRK#What's this? @BRK#The Chronicles of Ursh @BRK#7 @BRK#' @BRK#'Boisterous fictions and bloody histories, with the occasional smattering of fine lyric verse.’ @BRK#Loken took out another, heavy book. @BRK#'Tyranny of the Panpacific,' @BRK#he read, and flipped open the cover to see the tide page. '"An Epic Poem in Nine Cantos, Exalting the Rule of Narthan Dume"... it sounds rather dry.’ @BRK#'It's raw-headed and robust, and quite bawdy in parts. The work of over-excited poets trying to turn the matter @BRK#of their own, wretched times into myth. I'm rather fond of it. I used to read such things as a child. Fairy tales from another time.’ @BRK#'A @BRK#better time?' @BRK#Sindermann baulked. 'Oh, Terra, no! An awful time, a murderous, rancorous age when we were sliding into species doom, not knowing that the Emperor would come and apply the brakes to our cultural plummet.’ @BRK#'But they comfort you?' @BRK#They remind me of my boyhood. That comforts me.’ @BRK#'Do you need comforting?' Loken asked, putting the books back in the basket and looking up at the old man. 'I've barely seen you since-' @BRK#'Since the mountains.’ Sindermann finished, with a sad smile. @BRK#'Indeed. I've been to the school on several occasions to hear you brief the iterators, but always there's someone standing in for you. How are you?' @BRK#Sindermann shrugged. 'I confess, I've been better.’ @BRK#"Your injuries still-' @BRK#'I've healed in body, Garviel, but...' Sindermann tapped his temple with a gnarled finger. 'I'm unsettled. I haven't felt much like speaking. The fire's not in me just now. It will return. I've kept my own company, and I'm on the mend.’ @BRK#Loken stared at the old iterator. He seemed so frail, like a baby bird, pale and skinny necked. It had been nine weeks since the bloodshed at the Whisperheads, and most of that time they had spent in warp transit. Loken felt he had begun to come to terms with things himself, but seeing Sindermann, he realised how close to the surface the hurt lay. He could block it out. He was Astartes. But Sindermann was a mortal man, and nothing like as resilient. @BRK#'I wish I could-' @BRK#Sindermann held up a hand. 'Please. The Warmaster himself was kind enough to speak with me about it, privately. I understand what happened, and I am a wiser man for it.' @BRK#Loken got out of the chair and allowed Sindermann to take his place. The iterator sat down, gratefully. @BRK#'He keeps me close.’ Loken said. @BRK#mo does?' @BRK#The Warmaster. He brought me and the Tenth with him on this undertaking, just to keep me by him. So he could watch me.’ @BRK#'Because?' @BRK#'Because I've seen what few have seen. Because I've seen what the warp can do if we're not careful.’ @BRK#Then our beloved commander is very wise, Garviel. Not only has he given you something to occupy your mind with, he's offering you the chance to reforge your courage in battle. He still needs you.’ @BRK#Sindermann got to his feet again and limped along the book stacks for a moment, tracing his thin hand across the spines. From his gait, Loken knew he hadn't healed anything like as well as he'd claimed. He seemed occupied with the books once more. @BRK#Loken waited for a moment. 'I should go.’ he said. 'I have duties to attend to.’ @BRK#Sindermann smiled and waved Loken on his way with eyelash blinks of his fingers. @BRK#'I've enjoyed talking with you again.’ Loken said. 'It's been too long.’ @BRK#'It has.’ @BRK#'I'll come back soon. A day or two. Hear you brief, perhaps?' @BRK#'I might be up to that.’ @BRK#Loken took a book out of the basket. These comfort you, you say?' @BRK#Yes.’ @BRK#'May I borrow one?' @BRK#'If you bring it back. What have you there?' Sindermann shuffled over and took the volume from Loken. 'Sumaturan poetry? I don't think that's you. Try this-' @BRK#He took one of the other books out of the chair's rack. @BRK#'The Chronicles of Ursh. @BRK#Forty chapters, detailing the savage reign of Kalagann. You'll enjoy that. Very bloody, with a high body count. Leave the poetry to me.’ @BRK#Loken scanned the old book and then put it under his arm. Thanks for the recommendation. If you like poetry, I have some for you.’ @BRK#'Really?' @BRK#'One of the remembrancers-' @BRK#'Oh yes.’ Sindermann nodded. 'Karkasy. I was told you'd vouched for him.’ @BRK#'It was a favour, to a friend.’ @BRK#'And by friend, you mean Mersadie Oliton?' @BRK#Loken laughed. You told me you'd kept your own company these last few months, yet you still know everything about everything.’ @BRK#That's my job. The juniors keep me up to speed. I understand you've indulged her a little. As your own remembrancer.’ @BRK#'Is that wrong?' @BRK#'Not at all!' Sindermann smiled. That's the way it's supposed to work. Use her, Garviel. Let her use you. One day, perhaps, there will be far finer books in the Imperial archives than these poor relics.’ @BRK#'Karkasy was going to be sent away. I arranged probation, and part of that was for him to submit all his work to me. I can't make head nor tail of it. Poetry. I don't do poetry. Can I give it to you?' @BRK#'Of course.’ @BRK#Loken turned to leave. What was the book you put back?' he asked. 'What?' @BRK#'When I arrived, you had volumes in your basket there, but you were also studying one, intently, it seemed to me. You put it back on the shelves. What was it?' @BRK#'Bad poetry.’ said Sindermann. @BRK#The fleet had embarked for Murder less than a week after the Whisperheads incident. The transmitted requests for assistance had become so insistent that any debate as to what the 63rd Expedition undertook next became academic. The Warmaster had ordered the immediate departure of ten companies under his personal command, leaving Varvaras behind with the bulk of the fleet to oversee the general withdrawal from Sixty-Three Nineteen. @BRK#Once Tenth Company had been chosen as part of the relief force, Loken had found himself too occupied with the hectic preparations for transit to let his mind dwell on the incident. It was a relief to be busy. There were squad formations to be reassigned, and replacements to be selected from the Legion's novitiate and scout auxiliaries. He had to find men to fill the gaps in Hellebore and Brakespur, and that meant screening young candidates and making decisions that would change lives forever. Who were the best? Who should be given the chance to advance to full Astartes status? @BRK#Torgaddon and Aximand assisted Loken in this solemn task, and he was thankful for their contributions. Little Horus, in particular, seemed to have extraordinary insight regarding candidates. He saw true strengths in some that Loken would have dismissed, and flaws in others that Loken liked the look of. Loken began to appreciate that Aximand's place in the Mournival had been earned by his astonishing analytical precision. @BRK#Loken had elected to clear out the dormitory cells of the dead men himself. @BRK#Vipus and I can do that.’ Torgaddon said. 'Don't bother yourself.' @BRK#'I want to do it.’ Loken replied. 'I should do it.’ @BRK#'Let him, Tarik.’ said Aximand. 'He's right. He should.’ Loken found himself truly warming to Little Horus for the first time. He had not imagined they would ever be close, but what had at first seemed to be quiet, reserved and stern in Little Horus Aximand was proving to be plain-spoken, empathic and wise. @BRK#When he came to clean out the modest, spartan cells, Loken made a discovery. The warriors had little in the way of personal effects: some clothing, some select trophies, and little, tightly bound scrolls of oath papers, usually stored in canvas cargo sacks beneath their crude cots. Amongst Xavyer lubal's meagre effects, Loken found a small, silver medal, unmounted on any chain or cord. It was the size of a coin, a wolfs head set against a crescent moon. @BRK#'What is this?' Loken asked Nero Vipus, who had come along with him. @BRK#'I can't say, Garvi.’ @BRK#'I think I know what it is.’ Loken said, a little annoyed at his friend's blank response, 'and I think you do too.’ @BRK#■'I really can't say.’ @BRK#Then guess.’ Loken snapped. Vipus suddenly seemed very caught up in examining the way the flesh of his wrist was healing around the augmetic implant he had been fitted with. @BRK#'Nero...' @BRK#'It could be a lodge medal, Garvi.’ Vipus replied dis-missively 'I can't say for sure.’ @BRK#That's what I thought.’ Loken said. He turned the silver medal over in his palm. 'Jubal was a lodge member, then, eh?' @BRK#'So what if he was?' @BRK#'You know my feelings on the subject.’ Loken replied. @BRK#Officially, there were no warrior lodges, or any other kind of fraternities, within the Adeptus Astartes. It was common knowledge that the Emperor frowned on such institutions, claiming they were dangerously close to cults, and only a step away from the Imperial creed, the @BRK#Lectio Divinitatus, @BRK#that supported the notion of the Emperor, beloved by all, as a god. @BRK#But fraternal lodges did exist within the Astartes, occult and private. According to rumours, they had been active in the XVI Legion for a long time. Some six decades earlier, the Luna Wolves, in collaboration with the XVII Legion, the Word Bearers, had undertaken the compliance of a world called Davin. A feral place, Davin had been controlled by a remarkable warrior caste, whose savage nobility had won the respect of the Astartes sent to pacify their warring feuds. The Davinite warriors had ruled their world through a complex structure of warrior lodges, quasi-religious societies that had venerated various local predators. By cultural osmosis, the lodge practices had been quiedy absorbed by the Legions. @BRK#Loken had once asked his mentor, Sindermann, about them. They're harmless enough,' the iterator had told him. 'Warriors always seek the brotherhood of their kind. As I understand it, they seek to promote fellowship across the hierarchies of command, irrespective of rank or position. A kind of internal bond, a ribwork of loyally that operates, as it were, perpendicular to the official chain of command.' @BRK#Loken had never been sure what something that operated perpendicular to the chain of command might look like, but it sounded wrong to him. Wrong, if nothing else, in that it was deliberately secret and thus deceitful. Wrong, in that the Emperor, beloved by all, disapproved of them. @BRK#'Of course,' Sindermann had added, 'I can't actually say if they exist.’ @BRK#Real or not, Loken had made it plain mat any Astartes intending to serve under his captaincy should have nothing to do with them. @BRK#There had never been any sign that anyone in the Tenth was involved in lodge activities. Now the medal had turned up. A lodge medal, belonging to the man who had turned into a daemon and killed his own. @BRK#Loken was greauy troubled by the discovery. He told Vipus that he wanted it made known that any man in his command who had information concerning the existence of lodges should come forwards and speak with him, privately if necessary. The next day, when Loken came to sort through the personal effects he had gathered, one last time, he found the medal had disappeared. @BRK#In the last few days before departure, Mersadie Oliton had come to him several times, pleading Karkasy's case. Loken remembered her talking to him about it on his return from the Whisperheads, but he had been too distracted then. He cared little about the fate of a remembrancer, especially one foolish enough to anger the expedition authorities. @BRK#But it was another distraction, and he needed as many as he could get. After consulting with Maloghurst, he told her he would intervene. @BRK#Ignace Karkasy was a poet and, it appeared, an idiot. He didn't know when to shut up. On a surface visit to Sixty-Three Nineteen, he had wandered away from the legitimate areas of visit, got drunk, and then shot his mouth off to such an extent he had received a near-fatal beating from a crew of army troopers. @BRK#'He is going to be sent away.’ Mersadie said. 'Back to Terra, in disgrace, his certification stripped away. It's wrong, captain. Ignace is a good man...' @BRK#'Really?' @BRK#'No, all right. He's a lousy man. Uncouth. Stubborn. Annoying. But he is a great poet, and he speaks the @BRK#truth, no matter how unpalatable that is. Ignace didn't get beaten up for lying.’ @BRK#Recovered enough from his beating to have been transferred from the flagship's infirmary to a holding cell, Ignace Karkasy was a dishevelled, unedifying prospect. @BRK#He rose as Loken walked in and the stab lights came on. @BRK#'Captain, sir.’ he began. 'I am gratified you take an interest in my pathetic affairs.’ @BRK#'You have persuasive friends.’ Loken said. 'Oliton, and Keeler too.’ @BRK#'Captain Loken, I had no idea I had persuasive friends. In point of fact, I had little notion I had friends at all. Mersadie is kind, as I'm sure you've realised. Euphrati... I heard there was some trouble she was caught up in.’ @BRK#There was.’ @BRK#'Is she well? Was she hurt?' @BRK#'She's fine.’ Loken replied, although he had no idea what state Keeler was in. He hadn't seen her. She'd sent him a note, requesting his intervention in Karkasy's case. Loken suspected Mersadie Oliton's influence. @BRK#Ignace Karkasy was a big man, but he had suffered a severe assault. His face was still puffy and swollen, and the braises had discoloured his skin yellow like jaundice. Blood vessels had burst in his hang-dog eyes. Every movement he made seemed to give him pain. @BRK#'I understand you're outspoken.’ Loken said. 'Something of an iconoclast?' @BRK#Tes, yes.’ Karkasy said, shaking his head, 'but I'll grow out of it, I promise you.’ @BRK#They want rid of you. They want to send you home.’ said Loken. The senior remembrancers believe you're giving the order a bad name.’ @BRK#'Captain, I could give someone a bad name just by standing next to them.’ @BRK#That made Loken smile. He was beginning to like the man. @BRK#'I've spoken with the Warmaster's equerry about you, Karkasy.’ Loken said. There is a potential for probation here. If a senior Astartes, such as myself, vouches for you, then you could stay with the expedition.’ @BRK#There'd be conditions?' Karkasy asked. @BRK#'Of course there would, but first of all I have to hear you tell me that you want to stay.’ @BRK#'I want to stay. Great Terra, captain, I made a mistake, but I want to stay. .1 want to be part of this.’ @BRK#Loken nodded. 'Mersadie says you should. The equerry, too, has a soft spot for you. I think Mal-oghurst likes an underdog.’ @BRK#'Sir, never has a dog been so much under.’ @BRK#'Here are the conditions.’ Loken said. 'Stick to them, or I will withdraw my sponsorship of you entirely, and you'll be spending a cold forty months lugging your arse back to Terra. First, you reform your habits.’ @BRK#'I will, sir. Absolutely.’ @BRK#'Second, you report to me every three days, my duties permitting, and copy me with everything you write. Everything, do you understand? Work intended for publication and idle scribbles. Nothing goes past me. You will show me your soul on a regular basis.’ @BRK#'I promise, captain, though I warn you it's an ugly, cross-eyed, crook-backed, club-footed soul.’ @BRK#'I've seen ugly.’ Loken assured him. The third condition. A question, really. Do you lie?' @BRK#'No, sir, I don't.’ @BRK#This is what I've heard. You tell the truth, unvarnished and unretouched. You are judged a scoundrel for this. You say things others dare not.’ @BRK#Karkasy shrugged - with a groan brought about by sore shoulders. 'I'm confused, captain. Is saying yes to that going to spoil my chances?' @BRK#'Answer anyway.’ @BRK#'Captain Loken, I always, always tell the truth as I see it, though it gets me beaten to a pulp in army bars. And, with my heart, I denounce those who lie or deliberately blur the whole truth.’ @BRK#Loken nodded. 'What did you say, remembrancer? What did you say that provoked honest troopers so far they took their fists to you?' @BRK#Karkasy cleared his throat and winced. 'I said... I said the Imperium would not endure. I said that nothing lasts forever, no matter how surely it has been built. I said that we will be fighting forever, just to keep ourselves alive.’ @BRK#Loken did not reply. @BRK#Karkasy rose to his feet. Was that the right answer, sir?' @BRK#'Are there any right answers, sir?' Loken replied. 'I know this... a warrior-officer of the Imperial Fists said much the same thing to me not long ago. He didn't use the same words, but the meaning was identical. He was not sent home.’ Loken laughed to himself. 'Actually, as I think of it now, he was, but not for that reason.’ @BRK#Loken looked across the cell at Karkasy. @BRK#The third condition, then. I will vouch for you, and stand in recognisance for you. In return, you must continue to tell the truth.’ @BRK#'Really? Are you sure about that?' @BRK#Truth is all we have, Karkasy. Truth is what separates us from the xenos-breeds and the traitors. How will history judge us fairly if it doesn't have the truth to read? I was told that was what the remembrancer order was for. You keep telling the truth, ugly and unpalatable as it might be, and I'll keep sponsoring you.’ @BRK#* Ф * @BRK#Following his strange and disconcerting conversation with Kyril Sindermann in the archives, Loken walked along to the gallery chamber in the flagship's midships where the remembrancers had taken to gathering. @BRK#As usual, Karkasy was waiting for him under the high arch of the chamber's entrance. It was their regular, agreed meeting place. From the broad chamber beyond the arch floated sounds of laughter, conversation and music. Figures, mostly remembrancers, but also some crew personnel and military aides, busded in and out through the archway, many in noisy, chattering groups. @BRK#The gallery chamber, one of many aboard the massive flagship designed for large assembly meetings, addresses and military ceremonies, had been given over to the remembrancers' use once it had been recognised that they could not be dissuaded from social gathering and conviviality. It was most undignified and undisciplined, as if a small carnival had been permitted to pitch in the austere halls of the grand warship. All across the Imperium, warships were making similar accommodations as they adjusted to the uncomfortable novelty of carrying large communities of artists and free-thinkers with them. By their very nature, the remembrancers could not be regimented or controlled the way the military complements of the ship could. They had an unquenchable desire to meet and debate and carouse. By giving them a space for their own use, the masters of the expedition could at least ring-fence their boisterous activities. @BRK#The chamber had become known as the Retreat, and it had acquired a grubby reputation. Loken had no wish to go inside, and always arranged to meet Karkasy at the entrance. It felt so odd to hear unrestrained laughter and jaunty music in the solemn depths of the @BRK#Vengeful Spirit. @BRK#Karkasy nodded respectfully as the captain approached him. Seven weeks of voyage time had seen @BRK#his injuries heal well, and the bruises on his flesh were all but gone. He presented Loken with a printed sheaf of his latest work. Other remembrancers, passing by in little social cliques, eyed the Astartes captain with curiosity and surprise. @BRK#'My most recent work.’ Karkasy said. 'As agreed.' @BRK#Thank you. I'll see you here in three days.' @BRK#There's something else, captain.’ Karkasy said, and handed Loken a data-slate. He thumbed it to life. Picts appeared on the screen, beautifully composed picts of him and Tenth Company, assembling for embarkation. The banner. The files. Here he was swearing his oath of moment to Targost and Sedirae. The Mournival. @BRK#'Euphrati asked me to give you this.’ Karkasy said. @BRK#Where is she?' Loken asked. @BRK#'I don't know, captain.’ Karkasy said. 'No one's seen her about much. She has become reclusive since...' @BRK#'Since?' @BRK#The Whisperheads.’ @BRK#'What has she told you about that?' @BRK#'Nothing, sir. She says there's nothing to tell. She says the first captain told her there was nothing to tell.’ @BRK#'She's right about that. These are fine images. Thank you, Ignace. Thank Keeler for me. I will treasure these.’ @BRK#Kakasy bowed and began to walk back into the Retreat. @BRK#'Karkasy?' @BRK#'Sir?' @BRK#'Look after Keeler, please. For me. You and Oliton. Make sure she's not alone too often.’ @BRK#'Yes, captain. I will.’ @BRK#Six weeks into the voyage, while Loken was drilling his new recruits, Aximand came to him. @BRK#'The Chronicles of UrshV @BRK#he muttered, noticing the volume Loken had left open beside the training mat. @BRK#'It pleases me.’ Loken replied. @BRK#'I enjoyed it as a child.’ Aximand replied. Vulgar, though.’ @BRK#'I think that's why I like it.’ Loken replied. 'What can I do for you?' @BRK#'I wanted to speak to you.’ Aximand said, 'on a private matter.’ @BRK#Loken frowned. Aximand opened his hand and revealed a silver lodge medal. @BRK#'I would like you to give this a fair hearing,' Aximand said, once they had withdrawn to the privacy of Loken's arming chamber. 'As a favour to me.’ @BRK# Той know how I feel about lodge activities?' @BRK#'It's been made known to me. I admire your purity, but there's no hidden malice in the lodge. You have my word, and I hope, by now, that's worth something.’ @BRK#'It is. Who told you of my interest?' @BRK#'I can't say. Garviel, there is a lodge meeting tonight, and I would like you to attend it as my guest. We would like to embrace you to our fraternity.’ @BRK#'I'm not sure I want to be embraced.’ @BRK#Aximand nodded his head. 'I understand. There would be no duress. Come, attend, see for yourself and decide for yourself. If you don't like what you find, then you're free to leave and disassociate yourself.’ @BRK#Loken made no response. @BRK#'It is simply a band of brothers.’ Aximand said. 'A fraternity of warriors, bi-partisan and without rank.’ @BRK#'So I've heard.’ @BRK#'Since the Whisperheads, we have had a vacancy. We'd like you to fill it.’ @BRK#'A vacancy?' Loken said. You mean Jubal? I saw his medal.’ @BRK#"Will you come with me?' asked Aximand. @BRK#'I will. Because it's you who's asking me.’ said Loken. @BRK#FOUR @BRK#Felling the Murder trees Megarachnid industry Pleased to know you @BRK#Their brothers on the tree were already dead, past saving, but Tarvitz could not leave them skewered and unavenged. The ruination of their proud, perfect forms insulted his eyes and the honour of his Legion. @BRK#He gathered all the explosives carried by the remaining men, and moved forwards towards the trees with Bulle and Sakian. @BRK#Lucius stayed with the others. 'You're a fool to do that.’ he told Tarvitz. @BRK#"We @BRK#might yet need those charges.’ @BRK#What for?' Tarvitz asked. @BRK#Lucius shrugged. "We've a war to win here.’ @BRK#That almost made Saul Tarvitz laugh. He wanted to say that they were already dead. Murder had swallowed the companies of Blood Angels and now, thanks to Eidolon's zeal for glory, it had swallowed them too. There was no way out. Tarvitz didn't know how many of the company were still alive on the surface, but if the other groups had suffered losses commensurate to their own, the full number could be little higher than fifty. @BRK#Fifty men, fifty Astartes even, against a world of numberless hostiles. This was not a war to win; this was just a last stand, wherein, by the Emperor's grace, they might take as many of the foe with them as they could before they fell. @BRK#He did not say this to Lucius, but only because others were in earshot. Lucius's brand of courage admitted no reality, and if Tarvitz had been plain about their situation, it would have led to an argument. The last thing the men needed now was to see their officers quarrelling. @BRK#'I'll not suffer those trees to stand.’ Tarvitz said. @BRK#With Bulle and Sakian, he approached the white stone trees, running low until they were in under the shadows of their grim, rigid canopies. The winged megarachnid up among the thorns ignored them. They could hear the cracking, clicking noises of the insects' feeding, and occasional trickles of black blood spattered down around them. @BRK#They divided the charges into three equal amounts, and secured them to the boles of the trees. Bulle set a forty-second timer. @BRK#They began to run back towards the edge of the stalk forest where Lucius and the rest of the troop lay in cover. @BRK#'Move it, Saul,' Lucius's voice crackled over the vox. @BRK#Tarvitz didn't reply. @BRK#'Move it, Saul. Hurry. Don't look back.’ @BRK#Still running, Tarvitz looked behind him. Two of the winged dades had disengaged themselves from the feeding group and had taken to the air. Their beating wings were glass-blurs in the yellow light, and the lightning flash glinted off their polished black bodies. They circled up away from the thorn trees and came on in the direction of the three figures, wings fhrocking the air like the buzz of a gnat slowed and amplified to gargantuan, bass volumes. @BRK#'Run!' said Tarvitz. @BRK#Sakian glanced back. He lost his footing and fell. Tarvitz skidded to a halt and turned back, dragging Sakian to his feet. Bulle had run on. Twelve seconds!' he yelled, turning and drawing his bolter. He kept backing away, but trained his weapon at the oncoming forms. @BRK#'Come on!' he yelled. Then he started to fire and shouted 'Drop! Drop!' @BRK#Sakian pushed them both down, and he and Tarvitz sprawled onto the red dirt as the first winged clade went over them, so low the downdraft of its whirring wings raised dust. @BRK#It rose past them and headed straight for Bulle, but veered away as he struck it twice with bolter rounds. @BRK#Tarvitz looked up and saw the second megarachnid drop straight towards him in a near stall, the kind of pounce-dive that had snared so many of his comrades earlier. @BRK#He tried to roll aside. The black thing filled the entire sky. @BRK#A bolter roared. Sakian had cleared his weapon and was firing upwards, point blank. The shots tore through the winged clade's thorax in a violent puff of smoke and chitin shards, and the thing fell, crushing them both beneath its weight. @BRK#It twitched and spasmed on top of them, and Tarvitz heard Sakian cry out in pain. Tarvitz scrabbled to heave it away, his hands sticky with its ichor. @BRK#The charges went off. @BRK#The Shockwave of flame rushed out across the red dirt in all directions. It scorched and demolished the nearby edge of the stalk forest, and lifted Tarvitz, Sakian and the thing pinning them, into the air. It blew Bulle off his feet, throwing him backwards. It caught the flying thing, tore off its wings, and hurled it into the thickets. @BRK#The blast levelled the three stone trees. They collapsed like buildings, like demolished towers, fracturing into brittle splinters and white dust as they fell into the fireball. Two or three of the winged clades feeding on the trees took off, but they were on fire, and the heat-suck of the explosion tumbled them back into the flames. @BRK#Tarvitz got up. The trees had been reduced to a heap of white slag, burning furiously. A thick pall of ash-white dust and smoke rolled off the blast zone. Burning, smouldering scads, like volcanic out-fhrow, drizzled down over him. @BRK#He hauled Sakian upright. The creature's impact on them had broken Sakian's right upper arm, and that break had been made worse when they had been thrown by the blast. Sakian was unsteady, but his gen-hanced metabolism was already compensating. @BRK#Bulk, unhurt, was getting up by himself. @BRK#The vox stirred. It was Lucius. 'Happy now?' he asked. @BRK#Beyond revenge and honour, Tarvitz's action had two unexpected consequences. The second did not become evident for some time, but the first was apparent in less than thirty minutes. @BRK#Where the vox had failed to link the scattered forces on the surface, the blast succeeded. Two other troops, one commanded by Captain Anteus, the other by Lord Eidolon himself, detected the considerable detonation, and followed the smoke plume to its source. United, they had almost fifty Astartes between them. @BRK#'Make report to me.’ Eidolon said. They had taken up position at the edge of the clearing, some half a kilometre from the destroyed Uees, near the hem of the stalk forest. The open ground afforded them ample warning of the approach of the megarachnid scurrier-clades, and if the winged forms reappeared, they could retreat swiftly into the cover of the thickets and mount a defence. @BRK#Tarvitz outlined all that had befallen his troop since landfall as quickly and clearly as possible. Lord Eidolon was one of the primarch's most senior commanders, the first chosen to such a role, and brooked no familiarity, even from senior line officers like Tarvitz. Saul could tell from his manner that Eidolon was seething with anger. The undertaking had not gone at all to his liking. Tarvitz wondered if Eidolon might ever admit he was wrong to have ordered the drop. He doubted it. Eidolon, like all the elite hierarchy of the Emperor's Children, somehow made pride a virtue. @BRK#'Repeat what you said about the trees.’ Eidolon prompted. @BRK#The winged forms use them to secure prey for feeding, lord.’ Tarvitz said. @BRK#'I understand that.’ Eidolon snapped. 'I've lost men to the winged things, and I've seen the thorn trees, but you say there were other bodies?' @BRK#The corpses of Blood Angels, lord.’ Tarvitz nodded, 'and men of the Imperial army force too.’ @BRK#'We've not seen that.’ Captain Anteus remarked. @BRK#'It might explain what happened to them.’ Eidolon replied. Anteus was one of Eidolon's chosen circle and enjoyed a far more cordial relationship with his lord than Tarvitz did. @BRK#'Have you proof?' Anteus asked Tarvitz. @BRK#'I destroyed the trees, as you know, sir.’ Tarvitz said. @BRK#'So you don't have proof?' @BRK#'My word is proof.’ said Tarvitz. @BRK#And good enough for me.’ Anteus nodded courteously. 'I meant no offence, brother.’ @BRK#And I took none, sir.’ @BRK# Той used all your charges?' Eidolon asked. @BRK#yes, @BRK#lord.’ @BRK#'A waste.’ @BRK#Tarvitz began to reply, but stifled the words before he could say them. If it hadn't been for his use of the explosives, they wouldn't have reunited. If it hadn't been for his use of the explosives, the ragged corpses of fine Emperor's Children would have hung from stone gibbets in ignominious disarray. @BRK#'I told him so, lord.’ Lucius remarked. @BRK#Told him what?' @BRK#That using all our charges was a waste.’ @BRK#'What's that in your hand, captain?' Eidolon asked. @BRK#Lucius held up the limb-blade. @BRK#You taint us.’ Anteus said. 'Shame on you. Using an enemy's claw like a sword...' @BRK#Throw it away, captain.’ Eidolon said. Tm surprised at you.’ @BRK#Yes, lord.’ @BRK#Tarvitz?' @BRK#Yes, my lord?' @BRK#The Blood Angels will require some proof of their fallen. Some relic they can honour. You say shreds of armour hung from those trees. Go and retrieve some. Lucius can help you.’ @BRK#'My lord, should we not secure this-' @BRK#'I gave you an order, captain. Execute it please, or does the honour of our brethren Legion mean nothing to you?' @BRK#'I only thought to-' @BRK#'Did I ask for your counsel? Are you a lord commander, and privy to the higher links of command?' @BRK#'No, lord.’ @BRK#Then get to it, captain. You too, Lucius. You men, assist them.’ @BRK#The local shield-storm had blown out. The sky over the wide clearing was surprisingly clear and pale, as if night was finally falling. Tarvitz had no idea of Murder's @BRK#diurnal cycle. Since they had made planetfall, night and day periods must surely have passed, but in the stalk forests, lit by the storm flare, such changes had been imperceptible. @BRK#Now it seemed cooler, stiller. The sky was a washed-out beige, with filaments of darkness threading through it. There was no wind, and the flicker of sheet lightning came from many kilometres away. Tarvitz thought he could even glimpse stars up there, in the darker patches of the open sky. @BRK#He led his party out to the ruins of the trees. Lucius was grumbling as if it was all Tarvitz's fault. @BRK#'Shut up.’ Tarvitz told him on a closed channel. 'Consider this ample payback for your kiss-arse display to the lord commander.’ @BRK#'What are you talking about?' Lucius asked. @BRK#'I told him it was a waste, lord.’ Tarvitz answered, mimicking Lucius's words in an unflattering voice. @BRK#'I did tell you!' @BRK#Yes, you did, but there's such a thing as solidarity. I thought we were friends.’ @BRK#We are friends.’ Lucius said, hurt. @BRK#'And that was the act of a friend?' @BRK#*We are the Emperor's Children.’ Lucius said solemnly. We seek perfection, we don't hide our mistakes. You made a mistake. Acknowledging our failures is another step on the road to perfection. Isn't that what our pri-march teaches?' @BRK#Tarvitz frowned. Lucius was right. Primarch Fulgrim taught that only by imperfection could they fail the Emperor, and only by recognising those failures could they eradicate them. Tarvitz wished someone would remind Eidolon of that key tenet of their Legion's philosophy. @BRK#'I made a mistake.’ Lucius admitted. 'I used that blade thing. I relished it. It was xenos. Lord Eidolon was right to reprimand me.’ @BRK#'I told you it was xenos. Twice.’ @BRK#Yes, you did. I owe you an apology for that. You were right, Saul. I'm sorry.’ @BRK#'Never mind.’ @BRK#Lucius put his hand on Tarvitz's plated arm and stopped him. @BRK#'No, it's not. I'm a fine one to talk. You are always so grounded, Saul. I know I mock you for that. I'm sorry. I hope we're still friends.’ @BRK#'Of course.’ @BRK#Your steadfast manner is a true virtue.’ Lucius said. 'I become obsessive sometimes, in the heat of things. It is an imperfection of my character. Perhaps you can help me overcome it. Perhaps I can learn from you.’ His voice had that childlike tone in it that had made Tarvitz like him in the first place. 'Besides.’ Lucius added, 'you saved my life. I haven't thanked you for that.’ @BRK#'No, you haven't, but there's no need, brother.’ @BRK#Then let's get this done, eh?' @BRK#The other men had waited while Tarvitz and Lucius conducted their private, vox-to-vox conversation. The pair hurried over to rejoin them. @BRK#The men Eidolon had picked to go with them were Bulle, Pherost, Lodoroton and Tykus, all men from Tarvitz's squad. Eidolon was so clearly punishing the troop, it wasn't funny. Tarvitz hated the fact that his men suffered because he was not in favour. @BRK#And Tarvitz had a feeling they weren't being punished for wasting charges. They were suffering Eidolon's opprobrium because they had achieved more of significance than either of the other groups since the drop. @BRK#They reached the ruined trees and crunched up the slopes of smouldering white slag. Remnants of stone thorns stuck out of the heap, like the antlers of bull deer, some blackened with charred scraps of flesh. @BRK#What do we do?' asked Tykus. @BRK#Tarvitz sighed, and knelt down in the white spoil. He began to sift aside the chalky debris with his gloved hands. This.’ he said. @BRK#They worked for an hour or two. Some kind of night began to fall, and the air temperature dropped sharply as the light drained out of the sky. Stars came out, properly, and distant lightning played across the endless grass forests ringing the clearing. @BRK#Immense heat was issuing from the heart of the slag heap, and it made the cold air around them shimmer. They sifted the dusty slag piece by piece, and retrieved two battered shoulder plates, both Blood Angels issue, and an Imperial army cap. 'Is that enough?' asked Lodoroton. 'Keep going.’ replied Tarvitz. He looked out across the dim clearing to where Eidolon's force was dug in. 'Another hour, maybe, and we'll stop.’ @BRK#Lucius found a Blood Angels helmet. Part of the skull was still inside it. Tykus found a breastplate belonging to one of the lost Emperor's Children. 'Bring that too.’ Tarvitz said. @BRK#Then Pherost found something that almost killed him. @BRK#It was one of the winged clades, burned and buried, but still alive. As Pherost pulled the calcified cinders away, the crumpled black thing, wingless and ruptured, reared up and stabbed at him with its hooked headcrest. Pherost stumbled, fell, and slithered down the slag slope on his back. The clade struggled after him, dragging its damaged body, its broken wing bases vibrating pointlessly. @BRK#Tarvitz leapt over and slew it with his broadsword. It was so near death and dried out that its body crumpled like paper under his blade, and only a residual ichor, thick like glue, oozed out. @BRK#'All right?' Tarvitz asked. @BRK#'Just took me by surprise.’ Pherost replied, laughing it off. @BRK#'Watch how you go.’ Tarvitz warned the others. @BRK#'Do you hear that?' asked Lucius. @BRK#It had become very still and dark, like a true and proper night fall. Amping their helmet acoustics, they could all hear the chittering noise Lucius had detected. In the edges of the thickets, starlight flashed off busy metallic forms. @BRK#They're back.’ said Lucius, looking round at Tarvitz. @BRK#Tarvitz to main party.’ Tarvitz voxed. 'Hostile contact in the edges of the forest.’ @BRK#We see it, captain.’ Eidolon responded immediately. 'Hold your position until we-' @BRK#The link cut off abruptly, like it was being jammed. @BRK#'We should go back.’ Lucius said. @BRK# Тез.’ Tarvitz agreed. @BRK#A sudden light and noise made them all start. The main party, half a kilometre away, had opened fire. Across the distance, they heard and saw bolters drumming and flashing in the darkness. Distant zinc-grey forms danced and jittered in the strobing light of the gunfire. @BRK#Eidolon's position had been attacked. @BRK#'Come on!' Lucius cried. @BRK#'And do what?' Tarvitz asked. 'Wait! Look!' @BRK#The six of them scrambled down into cover on one side of the spoil heap. Megarachnid were approaching from the edges of the forest, their marching grey forms almost invisible except where they caught the starlight and the distant blink of lightning. They were streaming towards the tree mound in their hundreds, in neat, ordered lines. Amongst them, there were other shapes, bigger shapes, massive megarachnid forms. Another clade variant. @BRK#Tarvitz's party slid down the chalky rubble and backed away into the open, the expanse of the clearing behind them, keeping low. To their right, Lord Eidolon's position was engulfed in loud, furious combat. @BRK#What are they doing?' asked Bulle. @BRK#'Look.’ said Tarvitz. @BRK#The columns of megarachnid ascended the heap of rabble. Warrior forms, equipped with quad-blades, took station around the base, on guard. Others mounted the slopes and began to sort the spoil, clearing it with inhuman speed and efficiency. Tarvitz saw warrior forms doing this work, and also clades of a similar design, but which possessed spatulate shovel limbs in place of blades. With minute precision, the megarachnid began to disassemble the rubble heap, and carry the loose debris away into the thickets. They formed long, mechanical work gangs to do this. The more massive forms, the clades Tarvitz had not seen before, came forwards. They were superheavy monsters with short, thick legs and gigantic abdomens. They moved ponderously, and began to gnaw and suck on the loose rubble with ghastly, oversized mouth-parts. The smaller clades scurried around their hefty forms, pulling skeins of white matter from their abdominal spinnerets with curiously dainty, weaving motions of their upper limbs. The smaller clades carried this fibrous, stiffening matter back into the increasingly cleared site and began to plaster it together. @BRK#They're rebuilding the trees.’ Bulle whispered. @BRK#It was an extraordinary sight. The massive clades, weavers, were consuming the broken scraps of the trees Tarvitz had felled, and turning them into fresh new material, like gelling concrete. The smaller clades, busy and scurrying, were taking the material and forming new bases with it in the space that others of their kind had cleared. @BRK#In less than ten minutes, much of the area had been picked clean, and the trunks of three new trees were being formed. The scurrying builders brought limb loads of wet, milk white matter to the bases, and then regurgitated fluid onto them so as to mix them as cement. Their limbs whirred and shaped like the trowels of master builders. @BRK#Still, the battle behind them roared. Lucius kept glancing in the direction of the fight. @BRK#'We should go back,' he whispered. 'Lord Eidolon needs us.' @BRK#'If he can't win without the six of us.’ Tarvitz said, 'he can't win. I felled these trees. I'll not see them built again. Who's with me?' @BRK#BUlle answered 'Aye.’ So did Pherost, Lodoroton and Tykus. @BRK#Very well.’ said Lucius. 'What do we do?' @BRK#But Tarvitz had already drawn his broadsword and was charging the megarachnid workers. @BRK#The fight that followed was simple insanity. The six Astartes, blades out, bolters ready, rushed the megarachnid work gangs and made war upon them in the cold night air. Picket dades, warrior forms drawn up as sentinels around the edge of the site, alerted to them first and rushed out in defence. Lucius and Bulle met them and slaughtered them, and Tarvitz and Tykus ploughed on into the main site to confront the industrious builder forms. Pherost and Lodoroton followed them, firing wide to fend off flank strikes. @BRK#Tarvitz attacked one of the monster 'weaver' forms, one of the builder dades, and split its massive belly wide open with his sword. Molten cement poured out like pus, and it began to daw at the sky with its short, heavy limbs. Warrior forms leapt over its stricken mass to attack the Imperials. Tykus shot two out of the air @BRK#and then decapitated a third as it pounced on him. The megarachnid were everywhere, milling like ants. @BRK#Lodoroton had slain eight of them, including another monster dade, when a warrior form bit off his head. As if unsatisfied with that, the warrior form proceeded to flense Lodoroton's body apart with its four limb-blades. Blood and meat partides spumed into the cold air. Bulle shot the warrior dade dead with a single bolt round. It dropped on its face. @BRK#Lucius hacked his way through the outer guards, which were closing on him in ever increasing numbers. He swung his sword, no longer playing, no longer toying. This was test enough. @BRK#He'd killed sixteen megarachnid by the time they got him. A dade with spatulate limbs, bearing a cargo of wet milky cement, fell apart under his sword strokes, and dying, dumped its payload on him. Lucius fell, his arms and legs glued together by the wet load. He tried to break free, but the organic mulch began to thicken and solidify. A warrior clade pounced on him and made to skewer him with its four blade arms. @BRK#Tarvitz shot it in the side of the body and knocked it away. He stood over Lucius to protect him from the xenos scum. Bulle came to his side, shooting and chopping. Pherost fought his way to join them, but fell as a limb-blade punched clean through his torso from behind. Tykus backed up close. The three remaining Emperor's Children blazed and sliced away at the enclosing foe. At their feet, Lucius struggled to free himself and get up. @BRK#'Get this off me, Saul!' he yelled. @BRK#Tarvitz wanted to. He wanted to be able to turn and hack free his stricken friend, but there was no space. No time. The megarachnid warrior dades were all over them now, diittering and slashing. If he broke off even for a moment, he would be dead. @BRK#Thunder boomed in the clear night sky. Caught up in the fierce warfare, Tarvitz paid it no heed. Just the shield-storm returning. @BRK#But it wasn't. @BRK#Meteors were dropping out of the sky into the clearing around them, impacting hard and super-hot in the red dirt, like lightning strikes. Two, four, a dozen, twenty. @BRK#Drop-pods. @BRK#The noise of fresh fire rang out above the din of the fight. Bolters boomed. Plasma weapons shrieked. The drop-pods kept falling like bombs. @BRK#'Look!' Bulk cried out. 'Look!' @BRK#The megarachnid were swarming over them. Tarvitz had lost his bolter and could barely swing his broadsword, such was the density of enemies upon him. He felt himself slowly being borne over by sheer weight of numbers. @BRK#'-hear me?' The vox squealed suddenly. @BRK#'W-what? Say again!' @BRK#'I said, we are Imperial! Do we have brothers in there?' @BRK#Yes, in the name of Terra-' @BRK#An explosion. A series of rapid gunshots. A Shockwave rocked through the enemy masses. @BRK#'Follow me in,' a voice was yelling, commanding and deep. 'Follow me in and drive them back!' @BRK#More searing explosions. Grey bodies blew apart in gouts of flame, spinning broken limbs into the air like matchwood. One whizzing limb smacked into Tarvitz's visor and knocked him onto his back. The world, scarlet and concussed, spun for a second. @BRK#A hand reached down towards Tarvitz. It swam into his field of view. It was an Astartes gauntlet. White, with black edging. @BRK#'Up you come, brother.’ @BRK#Tarvitz grabbed at it and felt himself hauled upright. @BRK#'My thanks.’ he yelled, mayhem still raging all around him. 'Who are you?' @BRK#'My name is Tarik, brother.’ said his saviour. 'Pleased to meet you.’ @BRK#FIVE @BRK#Informal formalities @BRK#The war dogs' rebuke @BRK#I can't @BRK#say @BRK#It was a little cruel, in Loken's opinion. Someone, somewhere - and Loken suspected the scheming of Maloghurst - had omitted to tell the officers of the 140th Expedition Fleet exactly who they were about to welcome on board. @BRK#The @BRK#Vengeful Spirit, @BRK#and its attendant fleet consorts, had drawn up majestically into high anchorage alongside the vessels of the 140th and the other ships that had come to the expedition's aid, and an armoured heavy shuttle had transferred from the flagship to the battle-barge @BRK#Misericord. @BRK#Mathanual August and his coterie of commanders, including Eidolon's equerry Eshkerrus, had assembled on one of the @BRK#Misericord's @BRK#main embarkation decks to greet the shuttle. They knew it was bearing the commanders of the relief taskforce from the 63rd Expedition, and that inevitably meant officers of the XVI Legion. With the possible exception of Eshkerrus, they were all nervous. The arrival of the Luna Wolves, the most famed and @BRK#feared of all Astartes divisions, was enough to tension any man's nerve strings. @BRK#When the shuttle's landing ramp extended and ten Luna Wolves descended through the clearing vapour, there had been silence, and that silence had turned to stifled gasps when it became apparent these were not the ten brothers of a captain's ceremonial detail, but ten captains themselves in full, formal wargear. @BRK#The first captain led the party, and made the sign of the aquila to Mathanual August. @BRK#'I am-' he began. @BRK#'I know who you are, lord.’ August said, and bowed deeply, trembling. There were few in the Imperium who didn't recognise or fear First Captain Abaddon. 'I welcome you and-' @BRK#'Hush, master.’ Abaddon said. We're not there yet.’ @BRK#August looked up, not really understanding. Abaddon stepped back into his place, and the ten, cloaked captains, five on each side of the landing ramp, formed an honour guard and snapped to attention, visors front and hands on the pommels of their sheathed swords. @BRK#The Warmaster emerged from the shuttle. Everyone, apart from the ten captains and Mathanual August, immediately prostrated themselves on the deck. @BRK#The Warmaster stepped slowly down the ramp. His very presence was enough to inspire total and unreserved attention, but he was, quite calculatedly, doing the one thing that made matters even worse. He wasn't smiling. @BRK#August stood before him, his eyes wide open, his mouth opening and closing wordlessly, like a beached fish. @BRK#Eshkerrus, who had himself gone quite green, glanced up and yanked at the hem of August's robes. Abase yourself, fool!' he hissed. @BRK#August couldn't. Loken doubted the veteran fleet master could have even recalled his own name at that moment. Horas came to a halt, towering over him. @BRK#'Sir, will you not bow?' Horus inquired. @BRK#When August finally replied, his voice was a tiny, embryonic thing. 'I can't.’ he said. 'I can't remember how.’ @BRK#Then, once again, the Warmaster showed his limitless genius for leadership. He sank to one knee and bowed to Mathanual August. @BRK#'I have come, as fast as I was able, to help you, sir.’ he said. He clasped August in an embrace. The Warmaster was smiling now. 'I like a man who's proud enough not to bend his knees to me.’ he said. @BRK#'I would have bent them if I had been able, my lord.’ August said. Already August was calmer, gratefully put at his ease by the Warmaster's informality. @BRK#'Forgive me, Mathanual... may I call you Mathanual? @BRK#Master @BRK#is so stiff. Forgive me for not informing you that I was coming in person. I detest pomp and ceremony, and if you'd known I was coming, you'd have gone to unnecessary lengths. Soldiers in dress regs, ceremonial bands, bunting. I particularly despise bunting.’ @BRK#Mathanual August laughed. Horus rose to his feet and looked around at the prone figures covering the wide deck. 'Rise, please. Please. Get to your feet. A cheer or a round of applause will do me, not this futile grovelling.’ @BRK#The fleet officers rose, cheering @BRK#and @BRK#applauding. He'd won them over. Just like that, thought Loken, he'd won them over. They were his now, forever. @BRK#Horus moved forwards to greet the officers and commanders individually Loken noticed Eshkerrus, in his purple and gold robes and half-armour, taking his greeting with a bow. There was something sour about the equerry, Loken thought. Something definitely put out. @BRK#'Helms!' Abaddon ordered, and the company commanders removed their helmets. They moved forwards, more casually now, to escort their commander through the press of applauding figures. @BRK#Horus whispered an aside to Abaddon as he took greeting kisses and bows from the assembly. Abaddon nodded. He touched his link, activating the privy channel, and spoke, in Cthonic, to the other three members of the Mournival. War council in thirty minutes. Be ready to play your parts.' @BRK#The other three knew what that meant. They followed Abaddon into the greeting crowd. @BRK#They assembled for council in the sttategium of the @BRK#Misericord, @BRK#a massive rotunda situated behind the barge's main bridge. The Warmaster took the seat at the head of the long table, and the Mournival sat down with him, along with August, Eshkerrus and nine senior ship commanders and army officers. The other Luna Wolf captains sat amongst the crowds of lesser fleet officers filling the tiered seating in the panelled galleries above them. @BRK#Master August called up hololithic displays to illuminate his succinct recap of the situation. Horus regarded each one in turn, twice asking August to go back so he could study details again. @BRK#'So you poured everything you had into this death trap?' Torgaddon began bluntly, once August had finished. @BRK#August recoiled, as if slapped. 'Sir, I did as-' @BRK#The Warmaster raised his hand. Tarik, too much, too stern. Master August was simply doing as Captain Frome told him.’ @BRK#'My apologies, lord.’ Torgaddon said. 'I withdraw the comment.’ @BRK#'I don't believe Tarik should have to.’ Abaddon cut in. This was a monumental misuse of manpower. Three companies? Not to mention the army units...' @BRK#'It wouldn't have happened under my watch.’ murmured Torgaddon. August blinked his eyes very fast. He looked like he was attempting not to tear up. @BRK#'It's unforgivable.’ said Aximand. 'Simply unforgivable.’ @BRK#We will forgive him, even so.’ Horus said. @BRK#'Should we, lord?' asked Loken. @BRK#'I've shot men for less.’ said Abaddon. @BRK#'Please.’ August said, pale, rising to his feet. 'I deserve punishment. I implore you to-' @BRK#'He's not worth the bolt.’ muttered Aximand. @BRK#'Enough.’ Horus smoothed. 'Mathanual made a mistake, a command mistake. Didn't you, Mathanual?' @BRK#'I believe I did, sir.’ @BRK#'He drip-fed his expedition's forces into a danger zone until they were all gone.’ said Horus. 'It's tragic. It happens sometimes. We're here now, that's all that matters. Here to rectify the problem.’ @BRK#What of the Emperor's Children?' Loken put in. 'Did they not even consider waiting?' @BRK#'For what, exactly?' asked Eshkerrus. @BRK#'For us.’ smiled Aximand. @BRK#'An entire expedition was in jeopardy.’ replied Eshkerrus, his eyes narrowing. We were first on scene. A critical response. We owed it to our Blood Angels brothers to-' @BRK#To what? Die too?' Torgaddon asked. @BRK#Three companies of Blood Angels were-' Eshkerrus exclaimed. @BRK#'Probably dead already.’ Aximand interrupted. They'd showed you the trap was there. Did you just think you'd walk into it too?' @BRK#We-' Eshkerrus began. @BRK#'Or was Lord Eidolon simply hungry for glory?' asked Torgaddon. @BRK#Eshkerrus rose to his feet. He glared across the table at Torgaddon. 'Captain, you offend the honour of the Emperor's Children.’ @BRK#That may indeed be what I'm doing, yes.’ Torgaddon replied. @BRK#Then, sir, you are a base and low-born-' @BRK#'Equerry Eshkerrus,' Loken said. 'None of us like Torgad-don much, except when he is speaking the truth. Right now, I like him a great deal.' @BRK#That's enough, Garviel,' Horns said quietly. 'Enough, all of you. Sit down, equerry. My Luna Wolves speak harshly because they are dismayed at this situation. An Imperial defeat. Companies lost. An implacable foe. This saddens me, and it will sadden the Emperor too, when he hears of it' @BRK#Horus rose. 'My report to him will say this. Captain Frame was right to assault this world, for it is clearly a nest of xenos filth. We applaud his courage. Master August was right to support the captain, even though it meant he spent the bulk of his military formation. Lord Commander Eidolon was right to engage, without support, for to do otherwise would have been cowardly when lives were at stake. I would also like to thank all those commanders who rerouted here to offer assistance. From this point on, we will handle it' @BRK#'How will you handle it, lord?' Eshkerrus asked boldly. @BRK#'Will you attack?' asked August. @BRK#"We @BRK#will consider our options and inform you presently. That's all.' @BRK#The officers filed out of the strategium, along with Sedi-rae, Marr, Moy, Goshen, Targost and Qruze, leaving the Warmaster alone with the Moumival. @BRK#Once they were alone, Homs looked at the four of them. Thank you, friends. Well played.' @BRK#Loken was fast learning both how the Warmaster liked to employ the Mournival as a political weapon, and what a masterful political animal the Warmaster was. Aximand had quietly briefed Loken on what would be required of him just before they boarded the shuttle on the @BRK#Vengeful Spirit. @BRK#The situation here is a mess, and the commander believes that mess has in part been @BRK#caused by incompetence and mistakes at command level. He wants all the officers reprimanded, rebuked so hard they smart with shame, but... if he's going to pull the 140th Expedition back together again and make it viable, he needs their admiration, their respect and their unswerving loyalty. None of which he will have if he marches in and starts throwing his weight around.’ @BRK#'So the Moumival does the rebuking for him?' @BRK#'Just so,' Aximand had smiled. The Luna Wolves are feared anyway, so let them fear us. Let them hate us. We'll be the mouthpiece of discontent and rancour. All accusations must come from us. Play the part, speak as bluntly and critically as you like. Make them squirm in discomfort. They'll get the message, but at the same time, the Warmaster will be seen as a benign conciliator.' @BRK#We're his war dogs?' @BRK#'So he doesn't have to growl himself. Exactly. He wants us to give them hell, a dressing down they'll remember and learn from. That allows him to seem the peacemaker. To remain beloved, adored, a voice of reason and calm. By the end, if we do things properly, they'll all feel suitably admonished, and simultaneously they'll all love the War-master for showing mercy and calling us off. Everyone thinks the Warmaster's keenest talent is as a warrior. No one expects him to be a consummate politician. Watch him and leam, Garvi. Learn why the Emperor chose him as his proxy.’ @BRK#'Well played indeed.’ Homs said to the Moumival with a smile. 'Garviel, that last comment was deliriously barbed. Eshkerrus was quite incandescent.’ @BRK#Loken nodded. 'From the moment I laid eyes on him, he struck me as man eager to cover his arse. He knew mistakes had been made.’ @BRK#"Yes, he did.’ Horus said. 'Just don't expect to find many friends amongst the Emperor's Children for a while. They are a proud bunch.’ @BRK#Loken shrugged. 'I have all the friends I need, sir.’ he said. @BRK#'August, Eshkerrus and a dozen others may, of course, be formally cautioned and charged with incompetence once this is done.’ Horns said lightly, 'but only once this is done. Now, morale is crucial. Now we have a war to design.’ @BRK#It was about half an hour later when August summoned them to the bridge. A sudden and unexpected hole had appeared in the shield-storms of One Forty Twenty, an abrupt break in the fury, and quite close to the supposed landing vectors of the Emperor's Children. @BRK#'At last.’ said August, 'a gap in that storm.’ @BRK#'Would that I had Astartes to drop into it.’ Eshkerrus muttered to himself. @BRK#'But you don't, do you?' Aximand remarked snidely. Eshkerrus glowered at Little Horns. @BRK#'Let's go in.’ Torgaddon urged the Warmaster. 'Another hole might be a long time coming.’ @BRK#The storm might close in again.’ Horus said, pointing to the radiating cyclonics on the lith. @BRK#'You want this world, don't you?' said Torgaddon. 'Let me take the speartip down.’ The lots had already been drawn. The speartip was to be Torgaddon's company, along with the companies of Sedirae, Moy and Targost. @BRK#'Orbital bombardment.’ Horus said, repeating what had already been decided as the best course of action. @BRK#'Men might yet live.’ Torgaddon said. @BRK#The Warmaster stepped aside, and spoke quietly, in Cfhonic, to the Mournival. @BRK#'If I authorise this, I echo August and Eidolon, and I've just had you take them to task for that very brand of rash mistake.’ @BRK#'This is different.’ Torgaddon replied. 'They went in blind, wave after wave. I'd not advocate duplicating that stupidity, but that break in the weather... it's the first they've detected in months.’ @BRK#'If there are brothers still alive down there.’ Little Horus said, 'they deserve one last chance to be found.’ @BRK#'I'll go in.’ said Torgaddon. 'See what I can find. Any sign that the weather is changing, I'll pull the speartip straight back out and we can open up the fleet batteries.’ @BRK#'I still wonder about the music.’ the Warmaster said. 'Anything on that?' @BRK#'The translators are still working.’ Abaddon replied. @BRK#Horus looked at Torgaddon. 'I admire your compassion, Tarik, but the answer is a firm no. I'm not going to repeat the errors that have already been made and pour men into-' @BRK#'Lord?' August had come over to them again, and held out a data-slate. @BRK#Horus took it and read it. @BRK#'Is this confirmed?' @BRK#Yes, Warmaster.’ @BRK#Horus regarded the Mournival. 'The Master of Vox has detected trace vox traffic on the surface, in the area of the storm break. It does not respond or recognise our signals, but it is active. Imperial. It looks like squad to squad, or brother to brother transmissions.’ @BRK#'There are men still alive.’ said Abaddon. He seemed genuinely relieved. 'Great Terra and the Emperor! There are men still alive down there.’ @BRK#Torgaddon stared at the Warmaster steadily and said nothing. He'd already said it. @BRK#Very well.’ said Horus to Torgaddon. 'Go.’ @BRK#8*8 @BRK#The drop-pods were arranged down the length of the @BRK#Vengeful Spirit's @BRK#fifth embarkation deck in their launch racks, and the warriors of the speartip were locking themselves into place. Lid doors, like armoured petals, were closing around them, so the drop-pods resembled toughened, black seed cases ready for autumn. Klaxons sounded, and the firing coils of the launchers were beginning to charge. They made a harsh, rising whine and a stink of ozone smouldered like incense in the deck air. @BRK#The Warmaster stood at the side of the vast deck space, watching the hurried preparations, his arms folded across his chest. @BRK#'Climate update?' he snapped. @BRK#'No change in the weather break, my lord.’ Mal-oghurst replied, consulting his slate. @BRK#'How long's it been now?' Horns asked. @BRK#'Eighty-nine minutes.’ @BRK#They've done a good job pulling this together in such a short time.’ Horus said. 'Ezekyle, commend the unit officers, please. Make it known I'm proud of them.’ @BRK#Abaddon nodded. He held the papers of four oaths of moment in his armoured hands. 'Aximand?' he suggested. @BRK#Little Horus stepped forwards. @BRK#'Ezekyle?' Loken said. 'Could I?' @BRK#"You want to?' @BRK#'Luc and Seghar heard and witnessed mine before the Whisperheads. And Tarik is my friend.’ @BRK#Abaddon looked sidelong at the Warmaster, who gave an almost imperceptible nod. Abaddon handed the parchments to Loken. @BRK#Loken strode out across the deck, Aximand at his side, and heard the four captains take their oaths. Little Horus held out the bolter on which the oaths were sworn. @BRK#When it was done, Loken handed the oath papers to each of them. @BRK#'Be well.’ he said to them, 'and commend your unit commanders. The Warmaster personally admired their work today.’ @BRK#Verulam Moy made the sign of the aquila. 'My thanks, Captain Loken.’ he said, and walked away towards his pod, shouting for his unit seconds. @BRK#Serghar Targost smiled at Loken, and clasped his fist, thumb around thumb. By his side, Luc Sedirae grinned with his ever half-open mouth, his eyes a murderous blue, eager for war. @BRK#'If I don't see you next on this deck...' Sedirae began. @BRK#'...let it be at the Emperor's side.’ Loken finished. @BRK#Sedirae laughed and ran, whooping, towards his pod. Targost locked on his helm and strode away in the opposite direction. @BRK#'Luc's blood is up.’ Loken said to Torgaddon. 'How's yours?' @BRK#'My humours are all where they should be.’ Torgaddon replied. He hugged Loken, with a clatter of plate, and then did the same to Aximand. @BRK#'Lupercal!' he bellowed, punching the air with his fist, and turned away, running to his waiting drop-pod. @BRK#'Lupercal!' Loken and Aximand shouted after him. @BRK#The pair turned and walked back to join Abaddon, Maloghust and the Warmaster. @BRK#'I'm always a little jealous.’ Little Horus muttered to Loken as they crossed the deck. @BRK#'Me too.’ @BRK#'I always want it to be me.’ @BRK#'I know.’ @BRK#'Going into something like that.’ @BRK#'I know. And I'm always just a little afraid.’ @BRK#'Of what, Garviel?' @BRK#That we won't see them again.’ @BRK#"We @BRK#will.’ @BRK#'How can you be so sure, Horus?' Loken wondered. @BRK#'I can't say.’ replied Aximand, with a deliberate irony that made Loken laugh. @BRK#The observing party withdrew behind the blast shields. A sudden, volatile pressure change announced the opening of the deck's void fields. The firing coils accelerated to maximum charge, shrieking with pent up energy. @BRK#The word is given.’ Abaddon instructed above the uproar. @BRK#One by one, each with a concussive bang, the drop-pods fired down through the deck slots like bullets. It was like the ripple of a full broadside firing. The embarkation deck shuddered as the drop-pods ejected free. @BRK#Then they were all gone, and the deck was suddenly quiet, and tiny armoured pellets, cocooned in teardrops of blue fire, sank away towards the planet's surface. @BRK#I can't say. @BRK#The phrase had haunted Loken since the sixth week of the voyage to Murder. Since he had gone with Little Horus to the lodge meeting. @BRK#The meeting place had been one of the aft holds of the flagship, a lonely, forgotten pocket of the ship's superstructure. Down in the dark, the way had been lit by tapers. @BRK#Loken had come in simple robes, as Aximand had instructed him. They'd met on the fourth midships deck, and taken the rail carriage back to the aft quarters before descending via dark service stairwells. @BRK#'Relax.’ Aximand kept telling him. @BRK#Loken couldn't. He'd never liked the idea of the lodges, and the discovery that Jubal had been a member had increased his disquiet. @BRK#This isn't what you think it is.’ Aximand had said. @BRK#And what did he think it was? A forbidden conclave. A cult of the @BRK#Lectio Divinitatus. @BRK#Or worse. A terrible assembly. A worm in the bud. A cancer at the heart of the Legion. @BRK#As he walked down the dim, metal deckways, part of him hoped that what awaited him would be infernal. A coven. Proof that Jubal had already been tainted by some manufacture of the warp before the Whisper-heads. Proof that would reveal a source of evil to Loken that he could finally strike back at in open retribution, but the greater part of him willed it to be otherwise. Little Horus Aximand was party to this meeting. If it was tainted, then Aximand's presence meant that taint ran profoundly deep. Loken didn't want to have to go head to head with Aximand. If what he feared was true, then in the next few minutes he might have to fight and kill his Mournival brother. @BRK# ЛУТю approaches?' asked a voice from the darkness. Loken saw a figure, evidently an Astartes by his build, shrouded in a hooded cloak. @BRK#Two souls.’ Aximand replied. @BRK#What are your names?' the figure asked. @BRK#'I can't say.’ @BRK#'Pass, friends.’ @BRK#They entered the aft hold. Loken hesitated. The vast, scaffold-framed area was eerily lit by candles and a vigorous fire in a metal canister. Dozens of hooded figures stood around. The dancing light made weird shadows of the deep hold's structural architecture. @BRK#'A new friend comes.’ Aximand announced. @BRK#The hooded figures turned. 'Let him show the sign.’ said one of them in a voice that seemed familiar. @BRK#'Show it.’ Aximand whispered to Loken. @BRK#Loken slowly held out the medal Aximand had given him. It glinted in the fire light. Inside his robe, his @BRK#other hand clasped the grip of the combat knife he had concealed. @BRK#'Let him be revealed.’ a voice said. @BRK#Aximand reached over and drew Loken's hood down. @BRK#'Welcome, brother warrior.’ the others said as one. @BRK#Aximand pulled down his own hood. 'I speak for him.’ he said. @BRK#Tour voice is noted. Is he come of his own free will?' @BRK#'He is come because I invited him.’ @BRK#'No more secrecy.’ the voice said. @BRK#The figures removed their hoods and showed their faces in the glow of the candles. Loken blinked. @BRK#There was Torgaddon, Luc Sedirae, Nero Vipus, Kalus Ekaddon, Verulam Moy and two dozen other senior and junior Astartes. @BRK#And Serghar Targost, the hidden voice. Evidently the lodge master. @BRK#'You'll not need the blade.’ Targost said gently, stepping forwards and holding out his hand for it. 'You are free to leave at any time, unmolested. May I take it from you? Weapons are not permitted within the bounds of our meetings.’ @BRK#Loken took out the combat knife and passed it to Targost. The lodge master placed it on a wall strut, out of the way. @BRK#Loken continued to look from one face to another. This wasn't like anything he had expected. @BRK#'Tarik?' @BRK#'We'll answer any question, Garviel.’ Torgaddon said. 'That's why we brought you here.’ @BRK#We'd like you to join us.’ said Aximand, 'but if you choose not to, we will respect that too. All we ask, either way, is that you say nothing about what and who you see here to anyone outside.’ @BRK#Loken hesitated. 'Or... ' @BRK#'It's not a threat.’ said Aximand. 'Nor even a condition. Simply a request that you respect our privacy.’ @BRK#We've known for a long time.’ Targost said, 'that you have no interest in the warrior lodge.’ @BRK#'I'd perhaps have put it more strongly than that.’ said Loken. @BRK#Targost shrugged. We understand the nature of your opposition. You're far from being the only Astartes to feel that way. That is why we've never made any attempt to induct you.’ @BRK#What's changed?' asked Loken. @BRK#You have.’ said Aximand. You're not just a company officer now, but a Mournival lord. And the fact of the lodge has come to your attention.’ @BRK#'Jubal's medal...' said Loken. @BRK#'Jubal's medal.’ nodded Aximand. 'Jubal's death was a terrible thing, which we all mourn, but it affected you more than anyone. We see how you strive to make amends, to whip your company into tighter and finer form, as you blame yourself. When the medal turned up, we were concerned that you might start to make waves. That you might start asking open questions about the lodge.’ @BRK#'So this is self-interest?' Loken asked. You thought you'd gang up on me and force me into silence?' @BRK#'Garviel.’ said Luc Sedirae, 'the last thing the Luna Wolves need is an honest and respected captain, a member of the Mournival no less, campaigning to expose the lodge. It would damage the entire Legion.’ @BRK#'Really?' @BRK#'Of course.’ said Sedirae. The agitations of a man like you would force the Warmaster to act.’ @BRK#'And he doesn't want to do that.’ Torgaddon said. @BRK#'He... knows?' Loken asked. @BRK#You seemed shocked.’ said Aximand. Wouldn't you be more shocked to learn the Warmaster @BRK#didn't @BRK#know @BRK#about the quiet order within his Legion? He knows. He's always known, and he turns a blind eye, provided we remain closed and confidential in our activities.’ @BRK#1 don't understand...' Loken said. @BRK#That's why you're here.’ said Moy. 'You speak out against us because you don't understand. If you wish to oppose what we do, then at least do so from an informed position.’ @BRK#'I've heard enough.’ said Loken, turning away. 'I'll leave now. Don't worry, I'll say nothing. I'll make no waves, but I'm disappointed in you all. Someone can return my blade to me tomorrow.’ @BRK#'Please.’ Aximand began. @BRK#'No, Horus! You meet in secret, and secrecy is the enemy of truth. So we are taught! Truth is everything we have! You hide yourselves, you conceal your identities... for what? Because you are ashamed? Hell's teeth, you should be! The Emperor himself, beloved by all, has ruled on this. He does not sanction this kind of activity!' @BRK#'Because he doesn't understand!' Torgaddon exclaimed. @BRK#Loken turned back and strode across the chamber until he was nose to nose with Torgaddon. 'I can hardly believe I heard you say that.’ he snarled. @BRK#'It's true.’ said Torgaddon, not backing down. The Emperor isn't a god, but he might as well be. He's so far removed from the rest of mankind. Unique. Singular. Who does he call brother? No one! Even the blessed pri-marchs are only sons to him. The Emperor is wise beyond all measure, and we love him and would follow him until the crack of doom, but he doesn't understand brotherhood, and that is @BRK#all @BRK#we meet for.’ @BRK#There was silence for a moment. Loken turned away from Torgaddon, unwilling to look upon his face. The others stood in a ring around them. @BRK#'We are warriors.’ said Targost. That is all we know and all we do. Duty and war, war and duty. Thus it has @BRK#been since we were created. The only bond we have that is not prescribed by duty is that of brotherhood.’ @BRK#That is the purpose of the lodge.’ said Sedirae. To be a place where we are free to meet and converse and confide, outside the strictures of rank and martial order. There is only one qualification a man needs to be a part of our quiet order. He must be a warrior.’ @BRK#'In this company.’ said Targost, 'a man of any rank can meet and speak openly of his troubles, his doubts, his ideas, his dreams, without fear of scorn, or monition from a commanding officer. This is a sanctuary for our spirit as men.’ @BRK#'Look around.’ Aximand invited, stepping forwards, gesturing with his hands. 'Look at these faces, Garviel. Company captains, sergeants, file warriors. Where else could such a mix of men meet as equals? We leave our ranks at the door when we come in. Here, a senior commander can talk with a junior initiate, man to man. Here, knowledge and experience is passed on, ideas are circulated, commonalities discovered. Serghar holds the office of lodge master only so that a function of order may be maintained.’ @BRK#Targost nodded. 'Horus is right. Garviel, do you know how old the quiet order is?' @BRK#'Decades...' @BRK#'No, older. Perhaps thousands of years older. There have been lodges in the Legions since their inception, and allied orders in the army and all other branches of the martial divisions. The lodge can be traced back into antiquity, before even the Unification Wars. It's not a cult, nor a religious obscenity. Just a fraternity of warriors. Some Legions do not practise the habit. Some do. Ours always has done. It lends us strength.’ @BRK#'How?' asked Loken. @BRK#'By connecting warriors otherwise divorced by rank or station. It makes bonds between men who would @BRK#otherwise not even know one another's name. We thrive, like all Legions, from our firm hierarchy of formal authority, the loyalty that flows down from a commander through to his lowest soldier. Loyal to a squad, to a section, to a company. The lodge reinforces complementary links @BRK#across @BRK#that structure, from squad to squad, company to company. It could be said to be our secret weapon. It is the true strength of the Luna Wolves, strapping us together, side to side, where we are already bound up top to toe.’ @BRK#'You have a dozen spears to carry into war.’ said Tor-gaddon quietly. 'You gather them, shaft to shaft, as a bundle, so they are easier to bear. How much easier is that bundle to carry if it is tied together around the shafts?' @BRK#'If that was a metaphor.’ Loken said, 'it was lousy.’ @BRK#'Let me speak.’ said another man. It was Kalus Ekad-don. He stepped forwards to face Loken. @BRK#There's been bad blood between us, Loken.’ he said blundy. @BRK#There has.’ @BRK#'A little matter of rivalry on the field. I admit it. After the High City fight, I hated your guts. So, in the field, though we served the same master and followed the same standard, there'd always be friction between us. Competition. Am I right?' @BRK#'I suppose...' @BRK#'I've never spoken to you.’ Ekaddon said. 'Never, informally. We don't meet or mix. But I tell you this much: I've heard you tonight, in this place, amongst friends. I've heard you stand up for your beliefs and your point of view, and I've learned respect for you. You speak your mind. You have principles. Tomorrow, Loken, no matter what you decide tonight, I'll see you in a new light. You'll not get any grief from me any more, because I know you now. I've seen you as the @BRK#man you are.’ He laughed, raw and loud. Terra, it's a crude example, Loken, for I'm a crude fellow, but it shows what the lodge can do.’ @BRK#He held out his hand. After a moment, Loken took it. @BRK#There's a thing at least.’ said Ekaddon. 'Now get on, if you're going. We've talking and drinking to do.’ @BRK#'Or will you stay?' asked Torgaddon. @BRK#'For now, perhaps.’ said Loken. @BRK#The meeting lasted for two hours. Torgaddon had brought wine, and Sedirae produced some meat and bread from the flagship's commissary. There were no crude rituals or daemonic practices to observe. The men - the brothers - sat around and talked in small groups, then listened as Aximand recounted the details of a xenos war that he had participated in, which he hoped might give them insight into the fight ahead. Afterwards, Torgaddon told some jokes, most of them bad. @BRK#As Torgaddon rambled on with a particularly involved and vulgar tale, Aximand came over to Loken. @BRK#Where do you suppose.’ he began quietly, 'the notion of the Mournival came from?' @BRK#'From this?' Loken asked. @BRK#Aximand nodded. 'The Mournival has no legitimate standing or powers. It's simply an informal organ, but the Warmaster would not be without it. It was created originally as a visible extension of the invisible lodge, though that link has long since gone. They're both informal bodies interlaced into the very formal structures of our lives. For the benefit of all, I believe.’ @BRK#'I imagined so many horrors about the lodge.’ said Loken. @BRK#'I know. All part of that straight up and down thing you do so well, Garvi. It's why we love you. And the lodge would like to embrace you.’ @BRK#"Will there be formal vows? All the theatrical rigmarole of the Mournival?' @BRK#Aximand laughed. 'No! If you're in, you're in. There are only very simple rules. You don't talk about what passes between us here to any not of the lodge. This is down time. Free time. The men, especially the junior ranks, need to be confident they can speak freely without any comeback. You should hear what some of them say.’ @BRK#'I think I might like to.' @BRK#That's good. You'll be given a medal to cany, just as a token. And if anyone asks you about any lodge confidence, the answer is "I can't say". There's nothing else really' @BRK#'I've misjudged this thing,' Loken said. 'I made it quite a daemon in my head, imagining the worst.’ @BRK#'I understand. Particularly given the matter of poor Jubal. And given your own staunch character.’ @BRK#'Am I... to replace Jubal?' @BRK#'It's not a matter of replacement.’ Litde Horns said, 'and anyway, no. Jubal was a member, though he hadn't attended any meetings in years. That's why we forgot to palm away his medal before your inspection. There's your danger sign, Garvi. Not that Jubal was a member, but that he was a member and had seldom attended. We didn't know what was going on in his head. If he'd come to us and shared, we might have pre-empted the horror you endured at the Whisperheads.’ @BRK#'But you told me I was to replace someone.’ Loken said. @BRK#Yes. Udon. We miss him.’ @BRK#'Udon was a lodge member?' @BRK#Aximand nodded. 'A long-time brother, and, by the way, go easy on Vipus.’ @BRK#Loken went over to where Nero Vipus was sitting, beside the canister fire. The lively yellow flames jumped @BRK#into the dark air and sent stray sparks oscillating away into the black. Vipus looked uncomfortable, toying with the heal-seam of his new hand. @BRK#'Nero?' @BRK#'Garviel. I was bracing myself for this.’ @BRK#Wiy?' @BRK#'Because you... because you didn't want anyone in your command to...' @BRK#'As I understand it.’ Loken said, 'and forgive me if I'm wrong, because I'm new to this, but as I understand it, the lodge is a place for free speech and openness. Not discomfort.’ @BRK#Nero smiled and nodded. 'I was a member of the lodge long before I came into your command. I respected your wishes, but I couldn't leave the brotherhood. I kept it hidden. Sometimes, I thought about asking you to join, but I knew you'd hate me for it.’ @BRK#You're the best friend I have.’ Loken said. 'I couldn't hate you for anything.’ @BRK#The medal though. Jubal's medal. When you found it, you wouldn't let the matter go.’ @BRK#'And all you said was "I can't say". Spoken like a true lodge member.’ @BRK#Nero sniggered. @BRK#'By the way.’ Loken said. 'It was you, wasn't it?' @BRK# ЛУ1Ш?' @BRK#4Vho took Jubal's medal.’ @BRK#'I told Captain Aximand about your interest, just so he knew, but no, Garvi. I didn't take the medal.’ @BRK#When the meeting closed, Loken walked away along one of the vast service tunnels that ran the length of the ship's bilges. Water dripped from the rusted roof, and oil rainbows shone on the dirty lakes across the deck. @BRK#Torgaddon ran to catch up with him. @BRK#'Well?' he asked. @BRK#'I was surprised to see you there.’ said Loken. @BRK#'I was surprised to see you there.’ Torgaddon replied. 'A starch-arse like you?' @BRK#Loken laughed. Torgaddon ran ahead and leapt up to slap his palm against a pipe high overhead. He landed with a splash. @BRK#Loken chuckled, shook his head, and did the same, slapping higher than Torgaddon had managed. @BRK#The pipe clang echoed away from them down the tunnel. @BRK#'Under the engineerium.’ Torgaddon said, 'the ducts are twice as high, but I can touch them.’ @BRK#'You lie.’ @BRK#'I'll prove it.’ @BRK#'We'll see.’ @BRK#They walked on for a while. Torgaddon whistled the Legion March loudly and tunelessly. @BRK#'Nothing to say?' he asked at length. @BRK#'About what?' @BRK#'Well, about that.’ @BRK#'I was misinformed. I understand better now.’ @BRK#'And?' @BRK#Loken stopped and looked at Torgaddon. 'I have only one worry.’ he said. 'The lodge meets in secret, so, logically, it is good at keeping itself secret. I have a problem with secrets.’ @BRK#'Which is?' @BRK#'If you get good at keeping them, who knows what kind you'll end up keeping.’ @BRK#Torgaddon maintained a straight face for as long as possible and then exploded in laughter. 'No good.’ he spluttered. 'I can't help it. You're so straight up and down.’ @BRK#Loken smiled, but his voice was serious. 'So you keep telling me, but I mean it, Tarik. The lodge hides itself so well. It's become used to hiding things. Imagine what it could hide if it wanted to.’ @BRK#The fact that you're a starch-arse?' Torgaddon asked. 'I think that's common knowledge.’ 'It is. It so is!' Torgaddon chuckled. He paused. 'So... will you attend again?' 'I can't say.’ Loken replied. @BRK#SIX @BRK#Chosen instrument @BRK#Rare picts @BRK#The Emperor protects @BRK#Four full companies of the Luna Wolves had dropped into the clearing, and the megarachnid forces had perished beneath their rapacious onslaught, those that had not fled back into the shivering forests. A block of smoke, as black and vast as a mountainside, hung over the battlefield in the cold night air. Xenos bodies covered the ground, curled and shrivelled like metal shavings. @BRK#'Captain Torgaddon.’ the Luna Wolf said, introducing himself formally and making the sign of the aquila. @BRK#'Captain Tarvitz.’ Tarvitz responded. 'My thanks and respect for your intervention.' @BRK#The honour's mine, Tarvitz.’ Torgaddon said. He glanced around the smouldering field. 'Did you really assault here with only six men?' @BRK#'It was the only workable option in the circumstances.’ Tarvitz replied. @BRK#Nearby, Bulle was freeing Lucius from the wad of megarachnid cement. @BRK#'Are you alive?' Torgaddon asked, looking over. @BRK#Lucius nodded sullenly, and set himself apart while he picked die scabs of cement off his perfect armour. Torgaddon regarded him for a moment, then turned his attention to the vox intel. @BRK#'How many with you?' Tarvitz asked. @BRK#'A speartip.’ said Torgaddon. 'Four companies. A moment, please. Second Company, form up on me! Luc, secure the perimeter. Bring up the heavies. Serghar, cover the left flank! Verulam... I'm waiting! Front up the right wing.’ @BRK#The vox crackled back. @BRK#'Who's the commander here?' a voice demanded. @BRK#'I am.’ said Torgaddon, swinging round. Flanked by a dozen of the Emperor's Children, the tall, proud figure of Lord Eidolon crunched towards them across the fuming white slag. @BRK#'I am Eidolon.’ he said, facing Torgaddon. @BRK#Torgaddon.’ @BRK#'Under the circumstances.’ Eidolon said, 'I'll understand if you don't bow.’ @BRK#'I can't for the life of me imagine any circumstances in which I would.’ Torgaddon replied. @BRK#Eidolon's bodyguards wrenched out their combat blades. @BRK#'What did you say?' demanded one. @BRK#'I said you boys should put those pig sticks away before I hurt somebody with them.’ @BRK#Eidolon raised his hand and the men sheathed their swords. 'I appreciate your intervention, Torgaddon, for the situation was grave. Also, I understand that the Luna Wolves are not bred like proper men, with proper manners. So I'll overlook your comment.’ @BRK#'That's @BRK#Captain @BRK#Torgaddon.’ Torgaddon replied. 'If I insulted you, in any way, let me assure you, I meant to.’ @BRK#'Face to face with me.’ Eidolon growled, and tore off his helm, forcing his genhanced biology to cope with the atmosphere and the radioactive wind. Torgaddon did the same. They stared into each other's eyes. @BRK#Tarvitz watched the confrontation in mounting disbelief. He'd never seen anyone stand up to Lord Eidolon. @BRK#The pair were chest-plate to chest-plate, Eidolon slighdy taller. Torgaddon seemed to be smirking. @BRK#'How would you like this to go, Eidolon?' Torgaddon inquired. 'Would you, perhaps, like to go home with your head stuck up your arse?' @BRK# Той are a base-born cur.’ Eidolon hissed. @BRK#'Just so you know.’ replied Torgaddon, 'you'll have to do an awful lot better than that. I'm a base-born cur and proud of it. You know what that is?' @BRK#He pointed up at one of the stars above them. @BRK#A star?' asked Eidolon, momentarily wrong-footed. @BRK#Yes, probably. I haven't the faintest idea. The point is, I'm the designated commander of the Luna Wolves speartip, come to rescue your sorry backsides. I do this by warrant of the Warmaster himself. He's up there, in one of those stars, and right now he thinks you're a cretin. And he'll tell Fulgrim so, next time he meets him.’ @BRK#'Do not speak my primarch's name so irreverently, you bastard. Horus will-' @BRK#There you go again.’ Torgaddon sighed, pushing Eidolon away from him with a two handed shove to the lord's breastplate. 'He's the Warmaster.’ Another shove. The Warmaster. @BRK#Your @BRK#Warmaster. Show some cursed respect.’ @BRK#Eidolon hesitated. 'I, of course, recognise the majesty of the Warmaster.’ @BRK#'Do you? Do you, Eidolon? Well, that's good, because I'm @BRK#it. @BRK#I'm his chosen instrument here. You'll address me as if I were the Warmaster. You'll show me some respect @BRK#too! Warmaster Horus believes you've made some shit-awful mistakes in your prosecution of this theatre. How many brothers did you drop here? A company? How many left? Serghar? Head count?' @BRK#Thirty-nine live ones, Tarik,' the vox answered. There may be more. Lots of body piles to dig through.’ @BRK#Thirty-nine. You were so hungry for glory you wasted more than half a company. If I was... @BRK#Primarch @BRK#Fulgrim, I'd have your head on a pole. The Warmaster may yet decide to do just that. So, @BRK#Lord @BRK#Eidolon, are we clear?' @BRK# ЛУе...' Eidolon replied slowly,'... are clear, captain.' @BRK#'Perhaps you'd like to go and undertake a review of your forces?' Torgaddon suggested. The enemy will be back soon, I'm sure, and in greater numbers.' @BRK#Eidolon gazed venomously at Torgaddon for a few seconds and then replaced his helm. 'I will not forget this insult, captain.’ he said. @BRK#Then it was worth the trip.’ Torgaddon replied, clamping on his own helmet. @BRK#Eidolon crunched away, calling to his scattered troops. Torgaddon turned and found Tarvitz looking at him. @BRK#'What's on your mind, Tarvitz?' he asked. @BRK#I've been wanting to say that for a long time, @BRK#Tarvitz wished to say. Out loud, he said, "What do you need me to do?' @BRK#'Gather up your squad and stand ready. When the shit comes down next, I'd like to know you're with me.’ @BRK#Tarvitz made the sign of the aquila across his chest. 'You can count on it. How did you know where to drop?' @BRK#Torgaddon pointed at the calm sky. 'We came in where the storm had gone out.’ he said. @BRK#Tarvitz hoisted Lucius to his feet. Lucius was still picking at his ruined armour. @BRK#That Torgaddon is an odious rogue.’ he said. Lucius had overheard the entire confrontation. @BRK#'I rather like him.’ @BRK#The way he spoke to our lord? He's a dog.’ @BRK#'I like dogs.’ Tarvitz said. @BRK#'I believe I will kill him for his insolence.’ @BRK#'Don't.’ Tarvitz said. That would be wrong, and I'd have to hurt you if you did.’ @BRK#Lucius laughed, as if Tarvitz had said something funny. @BRK#'I mean it.’ Tarvitz said. @BRK#Lucius laughed even more. @BRK#It took a little under an hour to assemble their forces in the clearing. Torgaddon established contact with the fleet via the astrotelepath he had brought with him. The shield-storms raged with dreadful fury over the surrounding stalk forests, but the sky directly above the clearing remained calm. @BRK#As he marshalled the remains of his force, Tarvitz observed Torgaddon and his fellow captains conducting a further angry debate with Eidolon and Anteus. There were apparently some differences of opinion as to what their course of action should be. @BRK#After a while, Torgaddon walked away from the argument. Tarvitz guessed he was recusing himself from the quarrel before he said something else to infuriate Eidolon. @BRK#Torgaddon walked the line of the picket, stopping to talk to some of his men, and finally arrived at Tarvitz's position. @BRK#"You seem like a decent sort, Tarvitz.’ he remarked. 'How do you stand that lord of yours?' @BRK#'It is my duty to stand him.’ Tarvitz replied. 'It is my duty to serve. He is my lord commander. His combat record is glorious.’ @BRK#'I doubt he'll be adding this endeavour to his triumph roll,' Torgaddon said. Tell me, did you agree with his decision to drop here?' @BRK#'I neither agreed nor disagreed.’ Tarvitz replied. 'I obeyed. He is my lord commander.’ @BRK#'I know that.’ Torgaddon sighed. 'All right, just between you and me, Tarvitz. Brother to brother. Did you like the decision?' @BRK#1 @BRK#really-' @BRK#'Oh, come on. I just saved your life. Answer me candidly and we'll call it quits.’ @BRK#Tarvitz hesitated. 'I thought it a little reckless.’ he admitted. 'I thought it was prompted by ambitious notions that had little to do with the safety of our company or the salvation of the missing forces.’ @BRK#Thank you for speaking honestly.’ @BRK#'May I speak honestly a little more?' Tarvitz asked. @BRK#'Of course.’ @BRK#'I admire you, sir.’ Tarvitz said. 'For both your courage and your plain speaking. But please, remember that we are the Emperor's Children, and we are very proud. We do not like to be shown up, or belittled, nor do we like others... even other Astartes of the most noble Legions... diminishing us.’ @BRK#'When you say "we" you mean Eidolon?' @BRK#'No, I mean we.’ @BRK#Very diplomatic.’ said Torgaddon. 'In the early days of the crusade, the Emperor's Children fought alongside us for a time, before you had grown enough in numbers to operate autonomously.’