Thaddeus watched Aescarion leave, seeing for the first time not a warrior but an old woman who had seen rather too much of the universe.

He switched the holo-servitor back to Korvax's pict-recording, reviewing for the hundredth time the same file that had perhaps sent Sarpedon deep into the warzone. As it had done every time before, the file cut out just before Korvax entered the instal-lation, but the original file must have shown the inside of the installation and the work the Adeptus Mechanicus had done there. Whatever it was, Stratix Luminae had been closed down soon afterwards and of the two known surviving staff members one had gone insane and the other had been relocated to an outpost almost hidden beneath a hive city.

Thaddeus switched off the holo. He knew as much about Stratix Luminae as anyone could now. He poured the liqueur back into the decanter and headed up to the bridge.

It would only be a few more days before the Cres-cent Moon reached the Stratix system, but in the back of his mind Thaddeus knew every intervening moment was wasted.

The s.p.a.ce around Stratix was diseased. A miasma of pestilence hung in the s.p.a.ce between planets, like an almost imperceptible gauze turning the dis-tant stars sickly colours and colouring the worlds of the Stratix system strange hues of decay. Stratix's sun was paler, and anyone who looked at it through the right filters would see sunspots, like black scabs, fes-tering on its surface. So strong was Teturact's influence that it had even infected the star that shone on his homeworld.

The system's blockade was a shoal of rotting ships, launched from Stratix's dockyards and canni-balised from merchant and outpost fleets throughout the system, or brought in from the fleets of worlds conquered in Teturact's name.

Squadrons of escorts were fitted to function as fire-ships, rigged to burst like seed pods in huge clouds of s.p.a.ce-borne spores that would eat their way through portholes and bulkheads and infect enemy crews.

Larger cruisers teemed with crew who needed neither heat nor air to work, making for ships that could only be disabled by complete oblit-eration, while other near-derelict cruisers had ma.s.sive armour plates welded to their prows so they could act as suicidal ram-ships like giant hypo-dermics loaded with disease.

Monitoring stations and orbital defence platforms turned weaponry out-wards, cyclonic torpedoes and magnalasers now hard-wired into crewmen whose minds were the only parts of them left alive.

Stratix itself was a giant gnarled ball of charred blackness, studded with glowing spots like embers where hive-forges still burned. The hives covered almost the entire surface of the planet and were charred with exhaust fumes, and whole swathes of city were obscured by thick streaks of toxic cloud. Here and there low-orbit docks broke the atmos-phere like tarnished metal thorns.

The other worlds were just as touched by Teturact. The whole system had warped according to his will.

Locanis, closest to the system's star, had a thick greenhouse of an atmosphere that had turned from pale grey to rotten black overnight. Callicrates was rich in the ores that Stratix used in its industries, but the silvery metallic surface was now pockmarked with patches of rust hundreds of kilometres across. St Phal was a graveyard world now, so thick with walking skeletal dead that from s.p.a.ce its surface seemed to squirm as if covered with maggots.

Stratix Luminae was even colder and whiter than ever. The gas giant of Majoris Crien was covered in swirling storms of sickly browns and purples where once it had been vibrant green, and its many moons were drifting away in erratic orbits as though the giant world was too weak to hold onto them any more.

The Three Sisters, the tiny, far-orbit ice worlds of Cygnan, Terrin and Olatinne, were pulling fur-ther and further from the distant sun as if trying to escape from the infection spreading across the sys-tem.

Teturact's tombship dropped back into reals.p.a.ce; it was like a home-coming. The comforting glow of disease surrounded the planets with haloes of pesti-lence. Somehow, s.p.a.ce smelt different here. It was redolent with life. Even through the many layers of armour between the void and the bridge of the tombship, the stench was there: the stench of home.

The crew of servitors and menials who had been jacked into the bridge had degenerated to the point whereonly fragments of their minds still worked. So the crew had brought more in, plugging their minds into the consoles and heaping more and more bod-ies against the banks of readouts and controls until the bridge was a single charnel pit, three deep in writhing corpses like a carpet of skin and muscle.

It was the ultimate slavery, for these near-dead to surrender their very humanity to Teturact. No one else was allowed on the bridge aside from Teturact and his bearers, because it was a place where any-one in control would be worshipped and that honour was only permissible for Teturact himself.

The front of the bridge gave way to a ma.s.sive viewscreen through which Teturact could see the beauty of the Stratix system stretching in front of him. Stratix represented more than just another world, it was the first, the heart of his corruption and the first proof that he truly had the power to rule worlds. He had done much good work on Eumenix and the place would be as solid a bastion as any in his empire, but the Stratix system was home.

Wordlessly, he urged the bridge crew to turn the ship towards Stratix. The bodies writhed beneath his feet and moaned as their minds were connected through the bridge cogitators to signal the main engines and thrusters.

Teturact let his mind sweep out. With every new world he became stronger, and his consciousness was no longer bound to his wizened body. He let it flow through the tombship, washing over the bright, roiling pits of corruption that were the minds of his wizards. He felt the fractured pride of the Navigator above the prow, still trying to hold on to the idea of the old naval aristocracy even as his flesh melted off his bones.

He could see beyond the ship, past die ripples it left in reals.p.a.ce as it pa.s.sed out into the void. It was warm and welcoming, tinted with disease, and he could hear, like the echoes of a distant choir, the voices clamouring for him to come and save them all over again. He could drink that feeling, their des-peration and their grat.i.tude, and the pleading that followed as they came to realise they would always need him to keep their slow deaths at bay. It was what fuelled him. It was why he had built a war machine out of his empire and engaged Imperial forces in grinding campaigns of attrition that only he could win.

He felt the desperate dimming of Strata's star and the warping of the gravitational web between the worlds - so powerful was the concept of Teturact as a G.o.d that it deformed the universe around it. He could taste the dark, rich taste of corruption so pure it could bleed across the void in a stain that would eventually cover his whole empire.

Strata itself was a glorious beating heart of suffer-ing, St Phal a suppurating wound in reality, Strata Luminae a hard white pearl of dead ice, Majoris Crien a bloated spectre. Teturact could feel them dis-torting s.p.a.ce around them, so powerful was the taint he had left on them. s.p.a.cecraft like swarms of locusts or huge lumbering monsters patrolled the system, and Teturact could hear them calling his name.

The beauty of it all still had the power to astound him. Teturact had seen extraordinary things and become immune to all of them but this - these bil-lions of souls in pain and rapture, pleading for his touch and singing praises in grat.i.tude, all forming a psychic tide that flowed into Teturact's mind.

But there was something else here, something that wasn't here before. Something pure and untouched by Teturact. Different, yes, shifted sideways from reality - but not diseased.

Teturact focused his will on the intrusion. Tiny and metallic, they were like needles sewing a wound back together, piercing the gauze of suffer-ing and driving deep into system s.p.a.ce. There were several tiny craft, faster than any Imperial ships of comparable size.

Teturact felt a cold, affronted anger. These were his worlds. The Imperial spearheads that had tried to punch into the Strata system at the start of the rebellion had paid for their boldness with madness followed by servitude in Teturact's armies. No one had dared poison this cauldron of disease with their cleanliness since then.

Teturact could smell a hot, bright bolt of psychic intelligence in one of the ships, something subtly different than a normal human psyker. It was taut, focused, and very, very powerful.

Teturact pulled back from the shoal of bright sliv-ers and let the whole system fill his mind. He could see the trails of near-normality that the ships left behind them and estimated the course they were tak-ing, straight as an arrow into the heart of the system.

Their route would take them to Stratix Luminae.

Teturact's consciousness snapped back into the confines of the bridge. The bodies piled up around him shuddered as even they felt the reso-nance of their lord's anger. He spat out an order with his mind to switch the tombship's course towards the frozen planet and intercept the intruders.

Stratix Luminae - no, thought Teturact, that could not be allowed.

Korvax slammed a new magazine into his bolter and heard half his squad doing the same. He glanced at Sergeant Veiyal - the sergeant's helmet had been dam-aged and he was bare-headed, his breath coiling white in the cold.'The others have our backs,' said Korvax. 'Sergeant Livris, your squad has the point. Veiyal, with me. Advance!

Korvax levelled his bolter and followed the a.s.sault Marines as they charged into the darkened heart of the outpost...

The air was close and Korvax recognised the smells that got through his helmet filter - gun smoke, blood both alien and human, unwashed and terrified men. His autosenses adjusted quickly to the darkness and Korvax saw tech-guard bodies lying where they had taken up fire points near the blast doors. Automated guns hung limp and shattered from the ceiling, and a gun-servitor lay dismembered on the makeshift defences.

The blast doors led into a single large, low room with a smouldering rectangular hole in the floor where a cargo elevator had once been. The security stations that covered the blast doors and entrance chamber were heavy constructions of ferrocrete with firing slits and automated guns - Korvax saw tech-guard bodies slumped at the fixed heavy stubbers and blood spattered across the walls and floor.

'They've been shredded, captain,' voxed Livris, who was moving rapidly into the entrance chamber with his a.s.sault squad.

'Shuriken fireV 'Something else'.

Korvax's squad moved in behind the a.s.sault Marines, training bolters on the dark corners that pooled where glowstrips had failed.

Livris peered over the edge of the cargo lift, auspex scanner in hand. 'Do we move in, captain?'

'Go, Livris. Cold and fast!

Livris dropped down the smoking hole, followed by the a.s.sault squad. Korvax could still hear the gunfire from outside as Squad Veiyal held off the remains of the eldar forces from the blast doors. If the xenos had got inside, they were doing a good job of hiding it - hardly any sound seemed to filter from the outpost's lower floors.

'It's a lab floor,' said Livris. "Wait, the auspex is...'

Gunfire erupted below. Chainblades chewed into metal.

'Squad, with me!' yelled Korvax and followed Squad Livris onto the floor below, power sword hot in his hand.

The darkness below was punctuated with strobing muzzle flashes. Heavy gothic architecture was crammed into the low-ceilinged lab floor, with ornate workstations covered in complex machinery and webs of gla.s.s tubing. Korvax saw tech-guard and lab personnel still living, and many more lying dead slumped on seats or consoles. Tech-guard were taking cover and firing almost blindly with lasguns.

Korvax couldn't see the enemy. Squad Livris were sending out suppressive volleys of bolt pistol fire and Kor-vax's tactical squad lent their own fire, spitting explosive bolts in all directions.

A battle-brother's scream ended in a choked-off gur-gle, and in the flash of gunfire Korvax saw him fall, a shining web of silvery filaments billowing over and through him, slicing through armour plates, coiling into armour joints and unravelling to shred the flesh and bone inside.

Korvax got a glimpse of the aliens - they had heavier armour suits than the warriors Korvax had fought at the barricades, with a large carapace over the back and large, thick forearm plates that helped support ma.s.sive weapons with spinning barrels that wove spirals of bright threads. The eldar aimed and a bolt of filaments shot out, bursting against one ofLivris's Marines and reduc-ing his pistol arm to a mess of loose armour and shredded muscle.

Korvax fired but too late, the eldar had disappeared, winking out of existence with a clap of air rushing into the s.p.a.ce he left behind.

'Teleporters!' yelled Korvax as gunfire continued to spatter across the darkened lab floor. A surviving tech-guard screamed as an unseen enemy shredded him with a monofilament burst.

Something flitted into view and disappeared, almost catching Sergeant Livris with its lethal web.

Korvax kept his head down and moved past his battle-brothers, trying to gauge the angle he would take if he were trying to kill as many of them as possible. He had to trust the alien attackers would be too distracted by the other Marines and their gunfire to notice him until it was too late.

He backed up against a pillar, listening carefully, try-ing to filter through the din of bolter and lasgun fire. He heard, very close, the burst of air as something materi-alised on the other side of the pillar.

He lashed round the pillar with his power sword and felt it cut through something, armour plate andflesh, not deep but enough to impose a split-second of pain and confusion. The eldar warrior turned in surprise, the emerald eyepieces of its conical helmet staring out at Korvax as the s.p.a.ce Marine grabbed it by the throat with his free hand.

He hauled the alien off its feet and slammed it hard into the pillar, then powered it up into the ceiling so the carapace on its back hit the low fluted roof. The carapace fractured and blue flashes of escaping energy confirmed Korvax's suspicion that the carapace housed the teleport-jump device.

Korvax lifted the xenos again and, before it could bring its flailing gun to bear, plunged his power sword through its chest. The flashes of the sword's power field illuminated the several warriors who jumped in to surround Korvax, perhaps half-a-dozen of them, moving to kill the Soul Drinkers'

obvious leader and avenge their fallen.

Livris's a.s.sault Marines jumped the eldar from behind, chainblades glancing off carapaces. Livris him-self beheaded one and Korvax took another, breaking its leg with a stamp of his foot and cutting the alien clean in two. The surviving xenos jumped again, flitting out of reality not to surround the Marines but to flee.

Korvax pulled his sword from the remains of the eldar at his feet. He saw a couple of surviving tech-guard still hunkered down amongst the equipment. There was a technician, too, a woman in an adept's robes, peeking terrified from beneath a lab bench, doubtlessly not know-ing whether to fear the aliens or the Soul Drinkers more.

Korvax walked over to the closest tech-guard and hauled him to his feet. The man's face was laced with blood where he had caught the edge of a filament burst and the barrel of his lasgun was warped, overheated from continuous firing.

'Are there any more?' asked Korvax sternly.

The tech-guard nodded and pointed to the far end of the lab floor, where a set of doors had been blown off their mountings leading to a dark corridor beyond.

Korvax dropped the tech-guard and led his Marines into the corridor. It was low and close, too narrow for two Marines to stand abreast. The air stank of some-thing rotting and biological, and his helmet pre-filter was flashing up warning runes to mark the toxins it was keeping out of his system. The corridor sloped down-wards and curved sharply back on itself, leading towards the next floor down.

Korvax looked down to see the floor ankle-deep in milky fluid, swimming with sc.r.a.ps of muscle tissue. It reflected the wan light from ahead, filtering weakly from the entrance to the next floor down. Normally security doors would have sealed off the lower floor, but they were open now.

Through the doorway Korvax glimpsed drifts of shat-tered gla.s.s and thick ribbed cables lying across a floor awash with the fluid, the drainage channels clogged with clotted wads of flesh. Gla.s.s cylinders three metres high stood in rows along the length of an enormous hangar-like room, some intact and full of fluids, others shattered.

Korvax slowed, edging towards the entrance, ready for that shuriken shot or energy blast. The eldar down here would have heard the battle above, they would know the Soul Drinkers were coming.

'Any movement on the auspexV he voxed.

'Nothing,' came the reply.

The first body Korvax saw was slumped over the shat-tered remains of a cylinder, its abdomen impaled on jagged shards of curved gla.s.s still stabbing up from the cylinder's base. It was an eldar, in a blue armoured body-glove with the helmet removed. The features of its slender, angular face were slack in death, its large dark eyes open. A shuriken pistol lay by its limp hand.

Another body lay nearby - or most of it at least, Korvax saw. This eldar's body had been bisected at the waist, and the lower half lay mangled several metres away.

Korvax waved his squad forward and cautiously they entered the room, Livris alongside him. There must have been five hundred of the cylinders here, arranged in rows like standing stones, with a clearing in the middle where cold vapour coiled off a huge hemispherical machine.

'Spread out!' ordered Livris, and his a.s.sault Marines broke formation as they entered, moving between the cylinders in ones and twos. Korvas kept his squad closer, and as he advanced towards the centre of the room he saw more and more eldar bodies, mostly warriors but also one or two xenos in elaborate robes whose enclosed helmets had complex crystalline arrays built in. The eldar leadership caste, all psychic, the guides of their species on the battlefield and off it. The Imperial studies of the eldar named them warlocks, and several had met their end here beneath Stratix Luminae. One body was full of shuriken discs - this was not the result of a tech-guard last stand.

Something else had happened here.'Something's alive,' voxed Livris curtly. Korvax looked across to see the sergeant consulting his auspex scanner.

'Where?'

'Everywhere.'

There was a strange, faint buzzing in the air now, like a failing lumoglobe, almost imperceptible but coming from everywhere at once.

Bio-alarms flashed on Korvax's retinal display. Toxins were building up in his blood now. His armour integrity was in the green so it was as if the poisons were sponta-neously appearing in his organs. His oolitic kidney kicked in to filter it out but if it kept increasing...

'I see him,' voxed the point Marine of his squad. Kor-vax looked through the cylinders and saw what the Marine was indicating - in front of the huge metallic hemisphere was a figure, kneeling as if in supplication, its warlock's robes spattered with blood.

'In position,' voxed Livris. Korvax knew he could give the word and the a.s.sault squad would be on the stranger in a heartbeat.

'Hold,' he replied. 'Squad, cover me.'

Korvax stepped slowly towards the figure. The area around the hemisphere was like a clearing in a forest of gla.s.s, and thick cables ran from ports all over the curved panels. The tingling, buzzing sound grew stronger and Korvax could feel the strain on his internal organs as more and more exotic poisons synthesized themselves in his bloodstream.

The figure stood. It was tall and slim, and even from behind Korvax recognised the elongated skull of the eldar. It turned around. Its long face was mournful and its eyes were weeping black blood.

Korvax levelled his bolt pistol at the alien's head. 'Why are you here, xenos? What do you want?'

The alien spoke a few hushed syllables, then as if sud-denly remembering the Marine could not speak its language- T could not hold it, brutish one. I thought... we could take it with us and keep it from you. We could destroy it.

But we were too late, you have let it grow for far too long.'

'What? What did you come for?'

The eldar smiled. The skin of its face was taut and it split hideously, weeping watery gore. Korvax saw blood running down its wrists to drip off its fingers and realised the alien was coming apart under some great force.

"You tell me, low creature. It was your kind that made it!

As Korvax watched, the eldar's skin turned mottled and dark, tendrils of blackness tracing out its veins. It slumped back down to its knees and its body sagged grotesquely, its skeleton coming apart under the same forces that were starting to prey on Korvax and his Marines.

'Squad Veiyal?' voxed Korvax, 'get onto the crews on the Carnivore. Have them prep the infirmary, we'll need every man checked out. Inform the Chaplain there is a potential moral threat on Stratix Luminae.'

'Understood,' came Sergeant Veiyal's voice, filtering down through the sound of static and muted gunfire.

'Marines, fall back!' ordered Korvax as the eldar war-lock collapsed in a welter of blood.

The eldar was dead, its remains twitching inside its stained robes. The plates of the hemisphere were pulsing in and out like a ribcage drawing breath, cables popping from the sockets.

Korvax turned and jogged with his squad as they fell back, then broke into a run as a terrible creaking roar began from the hemisphere and the floor and walls began to warp. The remaining cylinders shattered one by one, filling the air with showers of liquid and gla.s.s, spilling malformed humanoid shapes out on the floor. A plate burst off the hemisphere, spinning across the huge room and embedding itself in a wall.

The buzzing became a scream and warning telltales flashed all over Korvax's retina. He saw battle-brothers flagging as they ran, the terrible influence of whatever lurked in the centre of the room working on their sys-tems. The eldar warlock had held on with his mind, the Marines had their bodies, but the eldar had been defeated and so could they.

Korvax was one of the last through the doorway. Livris, beside him, slammed a palm into the door controls and the ma.s.sive security doors began to yawn closed.

'Move!' yelled Korvax. 'Get to the surface, this battle is over!'Before the doors shut Korvax saw the hemisphere erupting in a huge gout of cables and machinery like metallic entrails, biomechanical equipment pouring up from a lower level and bringing a force with it that Kor-vax could feel in his very bones. The gene-seed organs in his throat and chest burned, his third lung and second heart were like lumps of molten metal in his chest.

Korvax just had time to see a human form rising from the middle of the destruction.

I The eldar had come to Stratix Luminae to kill it. They had been too late. As Korvax rushed towards the surface, he hoped the Imperium would not make the same mis-take. ..