Nicias's prisoner had given up struggling by now. Dressed in simple rust-red coveralls, blackened with grime and the residue of bolter fire, the prisoner simply hung on as Nicias hauled the rag-doll figure around with one hand while his other held his bolt pistol.

Salk ducked to one side to see what lay within the breach. A sergeant of the Polios troops was organising his men into a firing line across the breach, most of them armed with autoguns, but there were a few shotguns mixed in. There were about twenty men, all dressed in the emerald green of Cartel Polios with bright gold buttons and buckles and shiny black knee-high boots. Most of the time they were used by the cartel for show, hence the garish uniforms, but the cartel had built itself on the intimidation value of a private army and these were well-trained and motivated men.

Salk nodded at Nicias and Krin, then cast a handful of coin-sized frag grenades past the slab of rubble he lay against. A series of low whumping explosions sounded and Salk scrambled up the slope of rubble towards the firing line through the falling dust kicked up by the grenades.

His first few shots were sprayed on full auto to keep the troopers' heads down. Then he switched to semi-auto and fired as he ran, bolts kicking up crimson spray as they snapped back heads of those soldiers firing back. Shells impacted all around him, a couple registering as flashes of pain as they penetrated the ceramite of his armour. Salk ran through the bursts of pain and leapt into the heart of the firing line.

This was how the Soul Drinkers fought. Cold and fast. A Space Marine was safest at the very heart of the battle, face-to-face with his enemy where his armour, weapons, physical strength and valour were magnified and the resolve of his enemy could be shattered. As Krin's recharged plasma gun burst liquid plasma over the far end of the line, Salk clubbed the stock of his bolter into the first face he saw. Streaked with grime and lined with fatigue, the trooper stared in disbelief at the three-metre killing machine that reared over him even as Salk's gun cracked into the side of his head. Salk pulled the body beneath him, drawing his combat knife and slashing at the trooper behind the first.

Salk's second victim fell, clutching at the deep wound across his torso scored by the monomolecu-lar edge of the knife. Nicias's bolt pistol spat shells into the troopers along the line and many were already running, to be cut down in turn by Nicias.

Nicias was still hefting the prisoner as if the quivering body weighed nothing. If the prisoner died, the whole mission would fail. But Nicias was using his massive, barrel-chested body to shield the prisoner 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 showers of sparks.

Salk pulled a third body off his knife and pumped half a magazine of bolter shells through the breach, showering the threshold of the spaceport with fire. The troopers' officer was trying to rally them into a new firing line on the smooth surface of the spaceport 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 assault. '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 masses of the crowd so heavily that his vox equipment had been damaged. Since the receiver was implanted in the ear and the transmitter 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 mass 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 assured 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, visionary 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 masses pouring towards the newly cleared breach. Three men, even Space 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. Massive 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 spaceport by shotgun-wielding troops with crimson as well as emerald on their uniforms. Household troops, bodyguards of the cartel heads. No match individually for Space 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 tearing 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 corner 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 spaceport concourse.

A sudden explosion ripped the docking clamp apart, sending chunks of metal spinning, split sandbags fountaining the earth, broken bodies flying. Stubber rounds cooked off like chains of firecrackers. 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 symbols 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.