Nicias was still hefting the prisoner as if the quiv-ering body weighed nothing. If the prisoner died, the whole mission would fail. But Nicias was using his ma.s.sive, barrel-chested body to shield the pris-oner from incoming fire. He was a huge man even for a Marine, which was why he was one of the Chapter's few heavy weapons troopers, and the few shots that hit him burst against his armour in show-ers of sparks.

Salk pulled a third body off his knife and pumped half a magazine of bolter sh.e.l.ls through the breach, showering the threshold of the s.p.a.ceport with fire. The troopers' officer was trying to rally them into a new firing line on the smooth surface of the s.p.a.ce-port itself - Krin vaporised him with a gout of superheated plasma and the Polios troopers broke and ran.

'Squad Salk, report in!' voxed Salk hurriedly to the Marines who had stayed behind to cover his a.s.sault.

'Aean, Hortis, Dryan!'

The only reply was broken fragments of speech cut up by static. Whichever of them was still alive was swamped by the ma.s.ses of the crowd so heavily that his vox equipment had been damaged. Since the receiver was implanted in the ear and the trans-mitter in the throat, that meant a fractured skull at least. It was no way for three good Marines to die, pulled down by a baying, half-mad ma.s.s of dying civilians. No way to lose Soul Drinkers, who in their entirety were down to about seven hundred battle-brothers. The mission was a costlier one than the Chapter could really afford, but if it succeeded Commander Sarpedon had a.s.sured Dreo and Squad Salk that it would be doing the Emperor's work in an immediate and valuable way.

Salk didn't know what Sarpedon's plan was. Dreo had, but he was dead, far beneath Hive Quintus. But Salk believed in Sarpedon, the mutated, vision-ary Librarian who had rallied the Soul Drinkers against the evils of Chaos and the blindness of the Imperium alike. If he had to die here to ensure the prisoner was delivered as Sarpedon commanded, then Salk would die.

Salk waved the two Marines with him forward as he slammed a fresh magazine into his bolter. They had to move now, while the troopers in front of them were scattered and the crowd had yet to surge forward behind them. Even now he could hear the ma.s.ses pouring towards the newly cleared breach. Three men, even s.p.a.ce Marines, could drown in the human tide.Salk clambered over the crest of the rubble and saw the Ventral Dock 31 spread out before him. Lit by makeshift landing lights of burning fuel drums, it was a wide expanse of blast-stained ferrocrete with landing zones marked out all over it. Ma.s.sive maintenance sheds and building-sized docking clamps broke up the surface, and many of these had been transformed into firepoints by Cartel Polios. Emerald-uniformed troopers manned heavy stub-bers and artillery pieces, nervously waiting for the hordes to burst in.

There, several hundred metres away, was Salk's immediate objective. An ugly, crouched craft, like a huge metal fly, squatted on one of the launch zones. Bulky servitors lugged thick fuel lines towards the craft as the maintenance crews tried frantically to prep it for takeoff. A gaggle of exotically dressed men, probably the leaders of Cartel Polios, were being escorted across the s.p.a.ceport by shotgun-wielding troops with crimson as well as emerald on their uni-forms. Household troops, bodyguards of the cartel heads. No match individually for s.p.a.ce Marines, but they could be guaranteed not to give up.

The ship was the only way off Eumenix, and the Soul Drinkers had to ensure they were the ones who took it. They had been dropped onto the planet what felt like a lifetime ago by drop pod, because the risks from the orbital batteries were too great for a Thunderhawk gunship to bring them down. The plan had been for Dreo to lead them out into the barrens outside the city so they could be picked up later, maybe months afterwards, but the risk from the plague extended even there and the prisoner would not have survived.

Ventral Dock 31 was the only choice left.

Salk ducked back down beyond heavy stubber fire from the closest hard point. A pair of two-man teams was hiding amongst the huge metal claws of a docking clamp, covering the breach.

Salk charged again, sending a volley of shots tear-ing into the heavy stubber position. Heavy chains of fire ripped into the ground all around him, one catching him on the greave and almost pitching him onto his face.

He spotted Nicias out of the cor-ner of his eye, taking shots to the torso as he tried to shield the prisoner. A plasma blast washed over the docking clamp and a couple of the gunners were turned to bursts of ash, but the fire kept coming, pinning down Salk and Nicias on the edge of the s.p.a.ceport concourse.

A sudden explosion ripped the docking clamp apart, sending chunks of metal spinning, split sand-bags fountaining the earth, broken bodies flying. Stubber rounds cooked off like chains of firecrack-ers. From the wreckage a single black-clad figure ran, gun in hand. Salk was about to open fire when he realised that the figure was as tall as he was, in power armour charred black but still with the chalice sym-bols picked out in bone on one shoulder pad.

'Good work, Brother Karrick,' voxed Salk.

Karrick crouched into a firing position, keeping troopers away from the firepoint. Salk sprinted to his side, Nicias behind him, and another plasma blast burst amongst the next firepoint along the line as Krin broke cover behind.

Fire rattled over the Marines' heads and Salk realised the fire from the s.p.a.ceport was being drawn into the crowds now swarming over the rubble behind him. 'Now!' he voxed, and the surviving Marines outran the approaching edge of the crowd, charging towards the lone s.p.a.cecraft. Salk sprayed bolter fire at any glimpse of emerald and Krin ripped a plasma shot into the ground by the Polios heads' entourage, forcing them to delay embarka-tion as they scattered from the incoming fire.

Salk felt small arms fire impacting against the ground all around him as he ran, ringing off his armour. He switched to semi-auto and flicked shots off at the bodyguard trying to drag the dignitaries towards the ship.

Two fell, and another spasmed as bolt pistol shots from Nicias tore through him. Kar-rick sprayed sh.e.l.ls around the rear of the ship and the bodyguards fell back, trying to put themselves between the incoming fire and the dignitaries.

Salk could see the heads of Cartel Polios now, clad in impractical aristocratic dress with so many layers they looked corpulent and farcical as they scram-bled around the rear of the ship, trying to shelter behind the sternward landing gear. The bodyguards were opening fire at the Marines and the crowds spilling over the concourse, but they didn't have the range of the Marines' disciplined bolter fire. A quick volley of snapped shots from Salk took one man's head off and knocked another off his feet like a punch to the gut.

Karrick kept the rest pinned down and Krin vaporised a handful of troopers trying to bring a missile launcher to bear.

Salk reached the prow of the ship, firing all the time, switching magazines as Nicias covered him with pistol fire and then sniping at the bodyguards through the landing gear.

'Get aboard!' voxed Salk to Nicias. Covered by Kar-rick, Nicias ran round the side of the ship and threw the prisoner over the extended boarding ramp and into the pa.s.senger compartment. A spray of fire sparked off his armour, tearing chunks from the ceramite as he vaulted his huge form into the ship.

Krin was next, then Salk and Karrick firing a full-auto volley as they clambered into the ship.Inside, the small compartment was luxuriantly upholstered in the deep, clashing greens and reds of Cartel Polios. There was room for about a dozen back here, and seemed cramped when filled with the bulk of four s.p.a.ce Marines and their single pris-oner. Salk glanced at the remains of his squad -Karrick's armour was charred and the purple paint-work had almost all blistered off. His helmet was gone and one side of his face was badly burned. Krin's gauntlets were smoking from the overheated plasma gun, and Nicias's armour was riddled with bullet scars. Many of Nicias's wounds were bleed-ing, his blood clotting almost instantly into dark red crystals.

The prisoner was slumped on the carpeted floor, motionless except for shallow breathing.

Salk turned and saw the hatchway leading into the c.o.c.kpit of the shuttle. It was shut. He slung his bolter, dug his ringers into the edge of the door and ripped it clear out of its frame, metal shrieking. In the c.o.c.kpit were two pilots in emerald uniforms, young and terrified, shivering with fear. They had neural jacks plugged into sockets in the backs of their shaven heads. Salk glanced at the readouts on the instrument panels in front of them - the shuttle was fuelled up and ready to go.

Salk removed his helmet, feeling sweat running down his face. The smell of gun smoke from his bolter, burned skin from Karrick and the ever-present miasma of hive city pollution, flooded his senses.

'Launch.' he said. The two pilots paused for a sec-ond, mesmerised by the immense armoured figure that had just torn its way into the c.o.c.kpit. Then they turned to the shuttle controls and, almost mechan-ically, began switching on the main engines and direction thrusters. The rumble of the main engines cut through the background noise of gunfire and screams.

Salk turned back into the pa.s.senger compart-ment. Past the closing boarding ramp he could see the crowd swirling just metres away, emaciated plague victims dragging down Cartel Polios body-guards and the heads of the cartel themselves. Krin lined up a shot into the crowd but Salk pushed his plasma gun aside - there was no need. Within a few seconds the shuttle would be aloft. There was noth-ing these people could do to them now.

The boarding ramp swung shut and there was a hiss as the interior pressurised. Salk looked through to the c.o.c.kpit and saw, through the frontal viewscreen, the spires of Hive Quintus burning and the smoke-laden clouds boiling up ahead.

The primary thrusters kicked in and the craft lurched forward, away from the burning nightmare of Eumenix and Hive Quintus. Salk was leaving many good Soul Drinkers in the hive city, including Captain Dreo, none of whom the Chapter could easily afford to lose. But as long as their prisoner survived and was brought off the planet, any losses were ultimately acceptable. Commander Sarpedon had made that very clear to Captain Dreo, and Salk had been compelled to carry out those same orders when Dreo was lost.

Salk returned to his squad. Karrick and Nicias both needed medical treatment and Salk had been apprenticed to the Chapter apothecarion as a novice, before he had been selected as a squad sergeant and then taken into Sarpedon's confidence after the terrible Chapter war. More importantly, the prisoner was in shock and would have to be prop-erly looked after.

They would have to search the shuttle for sup-plies. It would be some time before they could expect pickup and they would have to keep the prisoner alive. But for the time being, he would have the squad enter half-sleep and take turns watching the prisoner, and settle into the routine that would keep them alive until they could return to the Chapter.

Salk didn't know the details of Sarpedon's plan. But he knew enough to guess that this mission was only the start.

Subsector Therion was a near-empty tract of s.p.a.ce, notable only for the scattered asteroid fields that yielded rare minerals to the hardy prospectors who mined them. It was these prospectors who first had alerted the Imperial Navy salvage teams to the pres-ence of something strange and truly immense that appeared without warning, as if cast randomly out of the warp.

It was huge. There were parts of it that were still recognisably Imperial warships, aquiline prows jut-ting from the ma.s.s of twisted metal. Smaller ships, fighters and escorts, were welded into nightmarish starbursts of jagged steel. Other parts were com-pletely alien, with scythe-shaped hulls or bulbous organic engine pods. No one could hope to count how many s.p.a.cecraft were mashed into the s.p.a.ce hulk, only that there were craft from every era and from civilisations that could not be identified. The hulk had clearly been in the wars, and recently -there was a new scar, silver and raw, where an enor-mous section of the hull had been torn open as if by a giant claw. The hulk was one of the ugliest things even the Imperial salvage crews had ever seen.

Inquisitor Thaddeus agreed with them. The mon-strous s.p.a.ce hulk was huge even from his vantage point on the bridge of the Crescent Moon, where the bridge holos projected a curved viewscreen several stories high above the engine room. The wide slice of s.p.a.ce that Thaddeus looked out on was domi-nated by thegrey-black ma.s.s of the hulk. The light of Therion, the subsector's primary star, picked out jagged metal edges and left the corners of the hulk in pitch black shadow. A few bright slivers hovering around the hulk were Imperial Navy salvage craft, which were transmitting their comms signals to the nearby escort cruiser Obedience and then on to the Crescent Moon.

The captain of the Obedience had accepted Thad-deus as the commander of the salvage operation without having to be asked. From the logs of the first few days of the operation, it seemed seventy-four salvage engineers had boarded the s.p.a.ce hulk so far. Thirteen had got out.

The survivors had reported that the craft seemed devoid of the dangerous organisms that normally inhabited s.p.a.ce hulks, but was instead rigged with well-hidden b.o.o.by traps. Bundles of frag grenades were wired to bulkhead hatches. Gun-servitors guarded intersections. Airlocks opened into hard vacuum.

But there had been glimpses of what was beyond. There were areas part.i.tioned into monastic cells, and a library crammed with leather-bound books.

One man reported a deck of fighter craft and vehi-cles. That had been before the news of the hulk's recovery had been pa.s.sed on to Thaddeus, and the exploration of the hulk had been halted at his request until he arrived to oversee it personally.

s.p.a.ce hulks, ships which were lost in the warp and drifted after centuries back into reals.p.a.ce, were frequently home to savage aliens, insane cultists, and worse. But this hulk, enormous as it was, did not seem to contain any such monstrosities. Rather, it appeared to have been inhabited until recently.

Thaddeus's fingers ran across the controls of the navigation pulpit and several inset images appeared on the viewscreen. They were jerky, low-res trans-missions from cameras mounted on the shoulders of salvage team officers, who were now waiting with their men in Navy landing boats attached to entry points on the near side of the hulk. There was no hope that they could explore anything like the whole ma.s.s of the hulk - such a task would take years given its size - so Thaddeus had ordered them into some of the more stable-looking, recognisable areas, like an early-pattern Imperial hospital ship and an escort destroyer from the time of the Gothic War.

Imperial Navy salvage teams were hard-bitten vet-erans of some of the most dangerous environments deep s.p.a.ce could offer. They knew men had died on the hulk, but they were prepared to go that bit fur-ther in than anyone else to make sure their crew got credited with a find that could be spent in the dives of the next port they put into. Armed with shotguns and sheer guts, most of them would be pirates or black marketeers if the Navy hadn't press-ganged them from the hives and frontier worlds. It would be a shame to have to mindwipe them if they found anything they shouldn't know about, but they understood that risk, too.

'Captain?' said Thaddeus.

'Lord inquisitor?' replied the clipped voice of the captain of the Obedience.

Thaddeus couldn't claim the status of a lord inquisitor, but he didn't correct the man. 'You may begin.'

The transmissions from the Obedience filtered through a film of static that came from the bridge speakers.

The images on the viewscreen juddered as the salvage crews, each a dozen strong, moved from their landing boats into the outer body of the hulk.

One team moved past the devotional plaques and shrines of the hospital ship, now dark and empty where once Sisters of the Orders Hospitaller had tended to the wounded from some unknown Impe-rial battlezone.

Another was in the cavernous entrails of a starship's engine room, keeping their weapon-mounted torches probing into the shadows beneath the plasma generators. The corridors were dark and deserted; the only sounds the footsteps and orders of the salvage crews and the creaking of the hull. Transmissions from the crews informed Thaddeus that the hulk seemed to be empty and, sinisterly, far too clean. The gravity was working and the atmosphere, most remarkably, scanned as safe on the teams' crude auspexes. The youngest mem-ber of each team was ordered to remove his respirator and the fact that he didn't drop dead meant that there were no airborne toxins.

Moving further into the hulk, one team found a brig that looked like it had been used recently, with new locks and cells with devotional High Gothic texts on the walls. A ship's bridge had been opened up and the complex electronics of the cogitators and comm-links spilled out across the deck, with monitoring devices hooked into the workings. The plasma generators encountered by the team in the engine decks had been restored to working order. Someone had lived in the hulk, cleaned up the use-able parts and even, it seemed, tried to make the hulk s.p.a.ceworthy If they had succeeded, the hulk would have been a formidable weapon indeed, a fortress capable of carrying a ma.s.sive number of personnel, along with the firepower of several of its const.i.tuent ships.

Thaddeus was now seriously entertaining the pos-sibility that the Pilgrim was right.'Coming up on Leros's crew.' came the voice of one of the team leaders. 'What's left of them.' The corresponding image showed the b.l.o.o.d.y remains of several men, blown apart as if by explosives or large-calibre gunfire, spattered around the corridor.

'Keep your wits about you, team seven.' ordered the Obedience's captain. Team seven, Thaddeus thought, probably didn't need reminding.

Thaddeus pressed an icon and the image from team seven was magnified on the viewscreen. They were in one of the warships, one with Low Gothic mottos scratched into the walls by a devoted crew. Leros's crew was scattered: an arm here, a head there, a weapon broken and thrown aside.

Something moved up ahead, a glint of metal.

'Halt!' barked the team's leader. 'Fall back! Lorko, you cover...'

A sheet of stuttering gunfire ripped down the cor-ridor. The image swung wildly and a gauze of static shivered over the scene. Thaddeus could make out a man thrown back against a wall, the chest of his dark grey coveralls shredded and sodden with blood. Another man fell backwards, the upper part of his body blown apart.

Shotgun fire ripped back. Bright trails of an auto-matic gun spattered across the corridor. The team leader was yelling orders to fall back to the next junction.

Thaddeus caught sight of what was shooting at them.

'Team seven.' he said calmly, knowing his voice would be relayed directly to the team leader. 'It's a gun-servitor. What explosives do you have?'

The leader was running back with his squad. 'Just signal flares.' he said breathlessly.

'Use them. It will be blinded.' Thaddeus heard the team leader gathering a hand-ful of flares from his men.

The screen burned scarlet as they were lit and thrown back down the corridor behind them.

The shooting stopped. The image filled with thick red smoke from the flare as the team ran towards the blinded servitor. A volley of thudding shotgun blasts came a second later.

'It's dead.' said the team leader. He had doubtless lost many men from his team on previous missions and his voice did not sound shaken in the least. 'It was never alive.' replied Thaddeus. 'Show me.' The leader kicked the closest flares down the cor-ridor and waved some of the smoke away. Thaddeus could make out, on the floor, the remains of the servitor - its lower half was a hover unit. Its arms had both been replaced with twin-linked autoguns connected to large cylinder box magazines. Its face was just a jutting ma.s.s of sensors. Presumably it would have been difficult to make and would have been set to guard something important - a task it had succeeded in with the first team to come across it. 'Proceed.' said Thaddeus.

The squad moved past the junction the servitor had been guarding. The leader glanced about, but Thaddeus saw that one of the corridors led to an arched doorway. 'That one.' he said.

The team a.s.sembled at the threshold. The room beyond was large and unlit, and nothing could be seen past the doorway.

'Auspex?' asked the leader.

'Nothing.' came the voice of one of his surviving crewmembers.

The leader shone his weapon torch through the doorway. The light played across a floor laid with smooth black marble veined in white, and across the foot of a bookcase. As the squad moved in they could see more in the light of their torches - cases of books that reached right up to the high ceiling. The shelves were full of books, most of them small volumes that could fit into the palm of a large man's hand, but there were a number of larger books, scrolls, and even stone tablets alongside them. A pulpit of stone stood before several rows of hardwood benches.

Team seven, are there signs of habitation?'

'No, sir.' said the leader.

'Movement!' came a shout from behind. The leader spun around to bring his gun to bear and his camera showed a squat shape drifting along the floor -another servitor, but not a combat pattern this time. It was an autoarchiver, its legs and arms replaced with long, thin jointed metal manipulators which removed and replaced volumes from the shelves as it moved along on the wheels set into its back.

It was still functioning. That meant this place -this library - had been used recently and had prob-ably been abandoned in a hurry.

'Leave it alone,' said Thaddeus. 'I want this place intact.'

'Understood.' said the team leader. 'Don't shoot it!' he yelled to his men. 'And don't touch anything. The bosses want it clean.'

A faint mumble of discontent from the other men indicated that they had been looking forward to seeingwhat they could loot.

Thaddeus glanced at the other images. One inset screen was blank - the team had stumbled into an explosive b.o.o.by trap in the hospital ship, a set of tripwires strung across the entrance to one of the surgery theatres. Another had lost three men when a gantry over an engine room gave way under their weight. The team in the brig were rifling through the contents of an armoury locker - they were tak-ing out wicked combat knives the size of short swords, power mauls and large calibre ammuni-tion for which the corresponding guns were missing. Gradually the teams were moving further into the hulk, and most of them were finding signs of a recent, organised and presumably human pres-ence. One or two had reached parts of the hulk evidently of xenos design. But here their orders were to halt.

Thaddeus looked back at team seven. The library seemed huge - several bulkheads had been removed to form a large enough s.p.a.ce. Mem-slate blocks stood like glossy black monoliths in rows between the bookshelves.

'Get me one of the books.' said Thaddeus.

The team leader took one of the small volumes from the nearest shelf.

'Catechisms Martial,' read the team leader from the gold lettering on the book's cover.

Thank you.' said Thaddeus, and switched from the team back to the officers on the Obedience.

Thaddeus was a well-read man - an inquisitor had to know a great deal about the various histories and philosophies of the Imperium to be able to root out the heresies that infected it. But he had only recently become acquainted with the Cate-. chisms Martial, a work of tactical philosophy that espoused a swift, shattering form of warfare where speed and overwhelming focused strength were the primary weapons.

It was written by the philosopher-soldier Daeny-athos. Daenyathos of the Soul Drinkers.

The Pilgrim had been right, again. The Soul Drinkers had made the hulk their home but they had left suddenly and recently. The hulk was the single biggest clue Thaddeus could reasonably have hoped to find, but it was still just a clue and not a part of the goal itself. The Soul Drinkers were somewhere else in the galaxy, pursuing some perverse plan while Thaddeus took tiny steps towards them.

'Captain.' Thaddeus transmitted to the Obedience, 'have your crews secure a landing zone. I shall over-see the exploration from the hulk.'

By the time the captain replied to object that the hulk was still not safe, Thaddeus was already gone from the bridge.

THREE.

The first sight of the enemy was a scarlet streak through the upper atmosphere, glimpsed from the port-hole of the Thunderhawk gunship as it plummeted from orbit towards the landing zone.

'Gunners, can you lock?' voxed Captain Korvax as the xenos craft flashed past.

In response the Chapter serfs who manned the gunship sent lances of heavy bolter fire chattering through the air, the report of the heavy weapons sounding through the hull and over the din of the ramjets decelerating the Thunderhawk. There was a flash of orange as the alien craft broke apart at speed, scattering a black drizzle of debris behind it.

One down. The serf gunners were good; the Soul Drinkers had trained them well. But the fact that the alien fighter had closed with them at all indicated that the Marines were coming to the battle late. These aliens were fast, and the outpost could be lost in minutes if the Soul Drinkers weren't faster. 'Fleet command, how's our landing zone?' voxed Kor- vax to the strike cruiser Carnivore, in high orbit far above the force of six Thunderhawks. 'Contested,' came the reply. 'Vox-traffic indicates xenos landfall of light troops, three hundred plus.' 'Understood,' replied Korvax. He knew that for this particular variety of heathen alien, the eldar, 'light troops' meant lightning-quick, skilled, and well-armed specialist soldiers.

'Prepare for rapid deployment,' ordered Korvax as the Thunderhawk's deceleration ramped up a notch and the G-force kicked in.

The engines flared and the Thunderhawk was hover-ing about thirty metres above the ground.

Korvax glanced out of the porthole - he could see two of the other gunships alongside. The shape of the outpost - a low building set into the hard frozen earth of the tundra - was broken by the Adeptus Mechanicus troops firing from the roof at the eldar moving rapidly towards it. Small arms fire from the strange eldar shuriken-firing weapons spattered against the Thunderhawk's hull.