The flagship's bombardment cannons fired a rolling volley into the Armiger. At such close range, each and every shell found its mark. The giant rounds - five times the mass and explosive power of a standard macro cannon shell - punched through the cruiser's armour and touched off a chain of catastrophic explosions inside the hull that overloaded the ship's plasma reactor. The huge warship disintegrated in a tremendous explosion, hurling molten debris in every direction.

One piece of the destroyed cruiser - a hunk of armoured superstructure as large as a city block - smashed into the flagship's port side just as she began her drop sequence. The Invincible Reason lurched to starboard under the tremendous impact, throwing off the precise manoeuvres directed by the ship's Ordnance Officer. But it was too late to abort; the automatic sequence had activated and the pods were firing at a rate of two per second. Within ten seconds all two hundred Astartes had been launched, their pods scattering through the atmosphere over the battle zone.

The drop pod's onboard power plant restarted a second after launch. Data displays flickered back to life and attitude thrusters fired, correcting the pod's corkscrewing tumble through the atmosphere. It juddered and shook like a toy in a giant's rough hands. Tortured air howled past the drop pod's rudimentary stabilisers, but their vertiginous spiral finally ceased.

The flagship had been hit hard, Nemiel reckoned, which meant that they had likely been knocked outside their deployment envelope. He scanned the readouts quickly while the pod's logic engines read its trajectory and projected its new landing point.

A yellow circle pulsed on the tactical map. Nemiel frowned. They were going to come down a few kilometres north of the tramway now, right into the middle of the rebel forces who were holding off the Imperial counterattack. That was going to complicate things. Nemiel checked the command frequency, but heard only static. Between the atmospheric ionization and the thick hulls of the drop pods, he wouldn't be able to speak to Force Commander Lamnos until the Astartes had reached the ground.

The Redemptor switched over to the squad net. 'Everyone still here?' he called.

'You were expecting us to go somewhere, brother?' Kohl replied at once.

A new voice came over the vox, mellower than Kohl but just as amused. 'I don't know about the rest of you, but I could stand to stretch my legs,' Askelon, their Techmarine, said with a chuckle. 'All this lying about is bad for the circulation.'

'Says the one who spends all his time with his head and shoulders buried in a maintenance bay,' Kohl retorted.

'Which makes me an authority on the subject, wouldn't you agree?' Askelon replied.

'That'll be the day,' snorted Brother Marthes, the squad's meltagunner. 'The day Sergeant Kohl stops being disagreeable is the day he stops breathing.'

'That's the stupidest thing I ever heard,' Kohl grumbled, and the squad laughed in reply.

The turbulence of re-entry rose to a bone-shaking crescendo and then held steady for a punishing nine-and-a-half minutes until a warning icon flashed on the display and the retro thrusters kicked in. The Ordnance division aboard the flagship had programmed the pods to deploy their thrusters at the last possible moment, just in case there was a significant anti-aircraft threat over the drop zone. The jolt was akin to being kicked in the backside by a Titan, Nemiel mused.

An ear-splitting roar swelled up from beneath their feet as the thrusters flared to full power for three full seconds, right up to the point of impact. Nemiel felt another, much lesser jolt, and dimly heard a rending crash, then a series of small, sharp impacts reverberated through the pod's hull before it finally came to rest.

Nemiel's display blanked, flashing an urgent red. 'Disengage and deploy!' he shouted over the squad net, and hit the quick-release on his re-entry harness.

There was a hiss and a rush of hot, reeking air as the ramp in front of him began to deploy - then stopped at roughly a sixty-degree angle. The hydraulics whined insistently, nearly shifting the pod's bulk with the effort, before the safety interlocks kicked in and aborted the process.

At the back of his mind, Nemiel sensed that the deck beneath him was angled slightly. He growled with irritation, took a step forward and planted a foot against the ramp. He heard a crackle of masonry; the ramp rebounded slightly, then lowered another half a degree.

Acrid smoke and waves of heat were starting to penetrate the inside of the re-entry chamber. Nemiel heard muffled cursing over the vox-net as other members of the squad tried to force their own way out of the pod. He took hold of the entry frame with one hand and the ramp's edge with the other and clambered up and out, then saw at once what had happened.

The pod had come down squarely atop a multistorey hab unit, punching like a bullet through at least four or five floors before finally coming to rest in the building's decrepit basement. Faint sunlight filtered down through the gaping hole of the floor above, all but occluded by clouds of increasingly thick smoke. The pod's retro thrusters had set the building's upper storeys ablaze.

Several of the pod's ramps had managed to open fully, while others, like Nemiel's, had been blocked by piles of debris. Brother-Sergeant Kohl was braced against the side of the pod and helping free Brother Vardus and his cumbersome heavy bolter.

Brother Askelon came around the side of the pod closest to Nemiel. His powerful servo arm deployed above his shoulder with a faint whine as he placed his feet carefully among the rubble. 'Stand clear!' he called, then opened the gripping claw of his arm and extended it against the side of the pod. Servo-motors hummed with gathering power. Askelon slid backwards a few centimetres; Nemiel stepped forward and tried to help brace him. Then, with a grating of powdered masonry and a groan of metal, the pod shifted slowly upright.

'Well done, brother,' Nemiel said, clapping the Techmarine on the shoulder as the pod's ramps fully deployed. 'Sergeant Kohl, find us a way out of here.'

'Aye, Brother-Redemptor,' Kohl answered, his tone all business now. He snapped orders to his squad, and the Astartes went to work. Already, Nemiel could hear the snap and crackle of lasgun fire outside, followed by the hollow bark of bolters.

Within seconds the squad was scrambling up a fallen slab of permacrete to reach the building's ground floor. Flaming debris fell amongst the Astartes like stray meteors; small pieces clattered harmlessly off their armour. At ground level, Sergeant Kohl pulled an auspex unit from his belt and took a compass reading in the smoky haze. 'Orders?' he asked Nemiel.

The Redemptor made a snap decision. 'We go north,' he said to Kohl.

Kohl checked the glowing readout once more, nodded curtly, and headed off into the blackness. The Astartes didn't bother fumbling about for a doorway - when he encountered an inner wall he barrelled right through the flimsy flakboard with scarcely a pause. In moments, the squad saw a large square of hazy light up ahead. Kohl led the squad through the viewport at a run, emerging onto the street outside in a shower of glittering glass shards and a billow of dirty grey smoke.

They were on a narrow avenue running roughly east-west through the grey zone. Piles of debris and dozens of blackened bodies dotted the road as far as Nemiel could see. Most of the buildings fronting the street were little more than hollowed-out shells, their facades blackened and cratered by small arms fire. A smashed six-wheel military transport lay on its side a few dozen metres to the squad's right, its tyres still burning. The air reverberated with the crackle and thump of weapons fire and the ominous whistle of mortar rounds arcing overhead.