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  This was really information that would have been more use to Vith before he’d been comfortable on the command deck with only fifty men.

  ‘Helios Nine,’ he voxed to the soldiers scattered across the outer ring of the chamber. ‘Enemy nearing the starboard doors. Show no mercy.’

  He spared a glance at the lord admiral, seeing the old man sweating, teeth clenched, eyes closed as if in the grip of some strenuous nightmare.

  The starboard doors exploding inwards stole his attention right back to where it should have been.

  When they had first come aboard, Talos had disembarked from the twisted wreckage of the hull where the pod had impacted, Aurum in one hand, Anathema gripped in the other. Despite ten minutes of infrequent fighting since then, he’d barely fired his bolter once. The same with Cyrion or Xarl. The squad was conserving its ammunition for when it really counted – once they reached the bridge.

  Their pod had struck the enemy ship in the densely-populated upper gunnery decks, and the resulting slaughter was a time-consuming annoyance that had grated on all their nerves.

  Except Uzas. Uzas had loved every moment of ploughing through the terrified crew as they put up what defences they could with tools and personal sidearms. The bark of his bolter was like a hammering in Talos’s head, unwelcome and aggravating.

  At one point Talos had slammed his brother against the arching wall of one passageway. Under fire from a retreating rabble of gunners ahead, he had thudded Uzas’s helm against the metal wall and snarled through his speaker grille.

  ‘You are wasting ammunition. Control yourself.’

  Uzas writhed out of his brother’s grip. ‘Prey.’

  ‘They are unworthy prey. Use your blades. Focus.’

  ‘Prey. They are all prey.’

  Talos’s fist cannoned into the other Night Lord’s face, denting his helm’s faceplate. It slammed his head back into the wall a second time, louder than gunfire. From the cluster of mortal crew at the end of the passageway, a solid round clanged from Talos’s shoulder guard. He ignored it, blinking to clear his visor display of the flashing warning runes.

  ‘Control yourself, or I will end you here and now.’

  ‘Yes,’ Uzas had finally said. ‘Yes. Control.’ He reached for his fallen bolter. Talos could see the reluctance in his brother’s movements as Uzas clamped the weapon to his thigh plate and drew a chainsword.

  His restraint had not lasted long. As the squad came to another chamber that housed one of the grand cruiser’s weapon turrets, he’d opened fire on the servitors that hadn’t received orders to flee when the human crew had run moments before.

  Talos led on, no longer caring if Uzas fell behind. Let him gorge on his need to instil terror. Let him waste his efforts on mindless servitors, just for the hope of seeing a flicker of fear in their eyes before the end.

  They moved with speed, slaughtering the ill-equipped crew that were foolish enough to stand before them. Most lacked the courage to remain, or had the good sense to flee, but not all of the mortals ran.

  Sergeant Undine of the armsmen squad Final Warning stood his ground, as did a total of seven of his men, their shotcannons firing a barrage down a narrow corridor at the advancing Astartes.

  Talos’s slanted eye lenses flickered with dull threat warnings, and his helmet’s sensor muted the sound of their ammunition striking his war-plate to the sound of hailstones clattering to the ground. Undine’s courageous last stand, and that of the valiant members of Final Warning, ended several seconds later when Talos waded through them, swinging Aurum with several annoyed curses. These delays were getting on his nerves, and while shotcannons offered little threat to his armour’s integrity, this kind of massed fire might strike a vulnerable joint or socket, and slow him further.

  And not all those who failed to flee offered any real resistance. Dozens of mortals stood in paralysed awe, locked in terror, as giants from mankind’s nightmares strode past them. They stood open-mouthed, muttering nonsensical benedictions and pointless prayers at the sight of Traitor Astartes in the flesh.

  Talos, Cyrion and Xarl ignored these. As they moved on, the sound of a chainblade told them that Uzas was apparently not content to let the fear-struck wretches live.

  Finally, Talos thought as he rounded yet another corner.

  ‘The bridge is beyond these doors,’ Xarl said, nodding at the sealed portal ahead. At the end of the wide thoroughfare corridor, the double doors stood closed and grim. Uzas pounded a fist against them, just once, resulting in nothing more than a small dent and the clang of ceramite against adamantium – a rock meeting an anvil.

  ‘Prey,’ Uzas said. The others heard his voice thick with saliva. He was drooling into his helm. ‘Prey.’

  ‘Be silent, freak,’ said Xarl. The others ignored Uzas as he started to claw at the locked bulkhead like a caged animal needing release.

  ‘These won’t blow,’ Cyrion said. ‘Much too thick.’

  ‘Chainblades, then.’ Xarl was already revving his up.

  ‘Too slow.’ Talos shook his head and hefted Aurum. ‘This has already taken too long,’ he said as he advanced with his stolen power sword.

  Helios Nine was ready when the Night Lords hit them.

  Under Vith’s orders, they’d taken up positions around the bridge chamber. The sheer number of adjacent passages offered a wealth of cover and corners to shoot around. The bridge crew were too rapt in the orbital war. They had their duties to attend to, and although nervous glances were cast at the starboard door, every officer present needed his attention on the void battle, which kept them hunched over consoles and staring up at the wide vista offered by the occulus screen.

  No one, least of all Helios Nine, had expected the reinforced doors to give way so easily. Over a metre thick, metal layered upon metal, the doors had stood unbroken since the ship’s construction almost two thousand years ago.

  Vith cursed as the explosion sounded. The Traitor Astartes had cut their way deep into the doors in order to lay explosives at the point where conventional detonators could actually sunder the command deck bulkheads.

  Throne of the Emperor, where were his reinforcements?

  ‘Helios Nine!’ he shouted over the vox, without any idea if they could even hear him over the echoing thunder. ‘Repel boarders!’

  Unseen by Vith and any of the armsmen, the old admiral’s eyes opened. Bloodshot, intensely blue, and narrowed in rage.

  The explosion, and the clutch of blind grenades that followed, was the signifying event that pulled the mighty Sword of the God-Emperor out of the close-pitched void war.

  In many of the records that would come to be written on the Crythe War, the Avenger-class grand cruiser remained a powerful force in the Imperium’s defence until its eventual destruction. Admittedly, the storming of its bridge was the blow that crippled the ship, leaving it robbed of some of its former effectiveness, but it continued to fight with all honour.

  History can be a humorous thing indeed, when written by the losers.

  Curiously absent from Imperial records documenting the battle was that the Sword spent its final half hour of life in relative indignity, robbed of its glorious fury and its expected honourable last stand. Instead it unleashed its reduced rage, directionless and limping, while it was systematically torn apart by the Warmaster’s cruisers – among them, the Covenant of Blood, which was not shy about opening fire on a vessel even while its own Astartes were on board. A swift and decisive victory demanded no less, and Astartes engaged in boarding actions were trained to withdraw immediately upon completing their objectives.

  The blind grenades thrown by First Claw rattled as they skidded across the mosaic-inlaid floor of the bridge chamber, detonating within a half-second of each other. A thick burst of black smoke spread from each grenade, and while the smoke screens belched out by each device were nowhere near enough to blacken even half of the vast bridge, that was never the intention with which they’d been deployed. The four grenades clanged across t
he deck towards the forward gunnery station and exploded there, blinding the dozen officers and servitors at the prow weapons consoles.

  As the naval ratings staggered back from the blinding cloud of smoke, the servitors remained where they were – slaved to their stations and emitting monotone warning complaints at the low level electromagnetic radiation in the cloud that stole their sight.

  At that moment, the forward guns of the great Sword fell silent.

  On another vessel, the Exalted grinned, knowing First Claw had reached the enemy bridge.

  Several of the Sword’s bridge crew cried out blessings to the immortal Master of Mankind. Among them, only the most pious and the most desperate actually believed the God-Emperor would save them.

  Helios Nine, blessed with a paradise of cover in the form of angled work stations and railings, raised their weapons as one, drawing beads on the savaged starboard door.

  A figure emerged, blacker than the shadows from which it stalked. Vith took in the sight – a towering killer, too large in all ways to be considered human, clad in bulky ceramite plate forged in a forgotten era. He drank in the details within the space of a single heartbeat: in one hand was a blade of gold, as long as Vith was tall, sparking with lethal power and still dripping molten metal from the door it had sliced through. In the other fist, an oversized bolter with a wide muzzle, open like the maw of some great beast.

  Its helmed visage was painted with a skull’s staring face, bone-white over midnight blue, with glaring red eye lenses lit up from within. A scroll, tattered and burn-marked by small-arms fire, was draped across its left shoulder, the surface of the creamy paper covered in runes alien to Vith’s eyes. On the other shoulder a clutch of short chains hung from the ceramite, bronzed skulls hanging from the dark iron links like morbid fruit, rattling as the figure moved.

  Vith’s tearing eyes took in one detail above all others. The ruined Imperial eagle across the figure’s chestpiece, carved from ivory and since marred by blade strikes to scar the symbol in a simple but effective act of desecration.

  The armsman leader had no comprehension that the Night Lord had taken the chestpiece from a fallen Astartes of the Ultramarines Chapter a few years before. He had no idea that ten thousand years ago when this warrior had first worn his own war-plate, only the favoured III Legion, the Emperor’s Children, had been granted the honour of wearing the aquila upon their armour. He had no idea Talos wore it now, even defiled, with a comfortable sense of irony.

  What Vith did know, and all that mattered, was that a Traitor Astartes had come into their midst, and that unless he ran – maybe even if he did run – he was a dead man.

  Vith was many things. An average officer, perhaps. A little too fond of his drink, certainly. But he was no coward. He would die with the words so many Imperial soldiers had died with on their lips across the millennia.

  ‘For the Emperor!’

  As noble as the sentiment was, his cry was utterly swallowed by what the Night Lord did next.

  Talos’s retinas were bombarded with chiming runes flickering across his visor. Target upon target upon target, detailing white flashes where weapons were visible. A single step into the chamber, he didn’t raise his weapons, nor did he seek cover. As soon as he emerged from the broken doorway, he threw his head back, blanking his visor of all the threat runes, and he screamed.

  It was a roar no unaugmented human could ever make: as resonant and primal as a feral world reptilian carnosaur. The roar, already inhumanly loud, was amplified by the vox speakers in Talos’s helm to deafening levels. Powered as it was by his three lungs, the cry stretched out for almost fifteen seconds at full strength, echoing through the corridors of the Sword in a flood of sound. The crewmen plugged into their consoles felt it physically, sending tremors through the vessel’s steel bones. Across the ship, tech-priests and servitors linked to the ship’s systems felt the machine-spirit soul of the Sword shiver in response to the unearthly roar.

  On the bridge, Lord Admiral Valiance Arventaur, at one with the Sword’s machine-spirit in a way infinitely more intimate than any other, began to cry blood.

  All of this went unnoticed by the armsmen surrounding their commander. They, like every other human in the sweeping circular chamber, were on their knees, hands clutching at their bleeding ears. Several would have killed themselves to escape the sense-shattering sound, had they been able to reach for their guns, which lay discarded where they fell.

  Talos lowered his head, seeing the threat runes blink back into existence. The smoke cloud was thinner now, but drifting to cover much of the command deck. Everyone, every single mortal on the bridge, was prone. The Sword idled in space, most of its guns fallen silent. Talos imagined the Warmaster’s fleet converging on the ship now, the eyes of every captain glinting with murderous intent.

  Time was short. The Claws deployed on the Sword of the God-Emperor had a handful of minutes to achieve their mission objectives and get back to their pods before they were killed in the coming destruction.

  In that moment, something happened that Talos would never forget to his dying day. From fifty metres away, through a break in the smoke and past the staggering forms of deafened crew, he met the admiral’s eyes. They bled thick red tears, the same trickles that ran from his nose and ears, but his expression was unmistakable. Never, in the countless years Talos had made war against the servants of the False Emperor, had one of the Imperial wretches glared at him with such hatred.

  He treasured the moment for the single, blood-warming instant it lasted, then whispered a single word.

  ‘Preysight.’

  At the soft command, his suit’s machine-spirit complied, masking the red-tinged view of his eye lenses in a deep, contoured series of blues. Through the smoke, even through the cover of consoles and work stations, the bridge crew were revealed to him in a maelstrom of blurry orange, red and yellow smears of heat sources against the cold blueness around.

  Cyrion, Xarl and Uzas stepped up behind him, and he heard their whispered commands as they activated their own hunting vision.

  With thermal sight active, they stalked forward, blades and bolters coming up to spill the blood of the Sword’s best and brightest as the mortals scrambled to recover their weapons.

  The admiral was the last to die.

  By that point, the bridge was a charnel house. Through the dissipating smoke that finally succumbed to the emergency air scrubbers, all one could see were the ruined bodies of a hundred crew and their slain defenders, Helios Nine. The four Night Lords moved here and there, taking chainswords to consoles and ripping the nerve centre of the failing Sword of the God-Emperor to pieces.

  The names of the slain were meaningless to Talos, and he had no idea that the last to fall by the admiral’s throne, shotcannon pounding out its ignorable bark, had been Cerlin Vith.

  Vith wheezed out the last of his life through his ruptured lungs, unable to lift his chin from his chest. He had been irrelevant to Talos, an irritating thermal blur, and the Night Lord had dispatched him with a simple thrust of his golden blade. As Vith fell, Talos kicked him from the throne’s podium, his attention already elsewhere as Vith’s head cracked on a railing and the mortal descended slowly into death.

  Lord Admiral Valiance Arventaur stared up at the creature who would be his murderer. The blood-coloured eyes of Talos’s helm stared down at the old man merged to his chair. Now, it made sense why the admiral had not raised himself up in the bridge’s defence. The mortal did not exist – in the flesh – below the waist. His uniformed torso was directly bound to his command throne by snaking cables sutured against his pelvis, linking him bodily to the ship as surely as the tendril-wires in the back of his head tied his consciousness to the Sword’s machine-spirit.

  Talos wasted perhaps a second wondering when the admiral had submitted to this invasive, restrictive surgery, and how long he had been confined here – a living piece of the vessel he commanded – bound to his throne as a half-human mess of flesh, wire, cabl
es and fluid exchange tubing.

  He wasted that second and then, gripped by curiosity, he wasted another by asking ‘Why would you do this to yourself, mortal?’

  He never got an answer. The admiral’s unshaven chin trembled as he tried to speak. ‘God-Emperor,’ the old man whispered. Talos ignited his power blade again, shaking his head.

  ‘I saw your Emperor. A handful of times, back in the age before he betrayed us all.’

  The sword slid into the admiral’s chest with sickening gentleness, inch by slow inch, charring the dusty white Battlefleet Crythe uniform as the powered blade burned the material where it touched. The blade’s tip sank into the bone of the command throne behind the mortal’s back, forming yet another bond between the admiral and his station.

  The effects were immediate. The bridge lighting flickered, and the ship itself groaned and rolled, tormented, like an injured whale in the black seas of Nostramo. The admiral’s death flooded the ship’s machine-spirit, and Talos withdrew the blade in a harsh pull. Blood hissed on the golden blade, dissolving against the heat.

  ‘And,’ the Night Lord said to the dying man, ‘he was no god. Perhaps not a man,’ the Astartes smiled, ‘but never a god.’

  The admiral tried to speak once more, his hands trembling as they reached out to Talos. The Night Lord gripped the dying shipmaster’s frail hands and left them folded over the blade wound in his chest.

  ‘Never a god,’ Talos repeated gently. ‘Know that truth, as you die.’

  With the admiral’s last breath, the lights on the bridge failed forever.

  The crew of the Sword of the God-Emperor might have regained control of their ship, except for two factors in the Night Lords’ attack.

  First and foremost, the teams of crew and armsmen that reached the bridge found the helm and every control console in the room ruined beyond use, displaying the jagged wounds left by the chainblades of First Claw. Using low-light visors to see in the darkness, these would-be saviours also found the admiral dead in his throne of bone, his face set in a twisted expression that lay somewhere in the ugliness between pain, hatred and fear.