He was received by Admiral Constantine of the Enduring Blade two weeks after his thirty-sixth birthday, earning a further service medal and a pleasant evening in the officers’ mess, courtesy of the navis nobilite. Life was good.

Three weeks into the new commission, with much of the nascent regiment still comprised of green-around-the-gills conscripts, the opportunity to add the tau to his burgeoning list of defeated enemies was forced upon him. The boarding had been a difficult affair and resistance was well-organised and heavy, but he was confident. The insertion of tech-priests into the engine bay had been fraught with difficulties, but malfunctions aside, the teleporter had succeeded in delivering a pair of adepts. With his two most trusted secondaries, Seylind had occupied the surrounding decks, sealed the engine bay with a tri-lock (his third of which nestled securely in his utility holster) and could now continue with the pressing business of co-ordinating the infiltration of the vessel. Yes — he had reason to be confident. With foresight and planning, no obstacle was insurmountable.

There’d be another medal in this one, he was certain. Perhaps even a promotion.

He smiled, arming his hellgun happily.

Someone shot him in the gut.

As the colour went out of his world, he felt gloved alien hands rummaging in the utility holster at his hip.

Adept Natsan, Reverus Illumina of Mars, magos of the Cult Deus-Mechanicus, second-level student of xenotech and mechanicus heretica, beneficiary of the Puritens lobotomy and recipient of no fewer than seventeen Spiritu-Mechanica surgical augmentations, was annoyed to notice he was bleeding heavily. He concentrated, internally arresting the flow of blood to his left upper limb, cauterising the wound with an acetylene lamp attached to his right elbow and watching as the neatly sliced flesh scarred over and cooked.

Matter transmission had proved contrary to his expectations. He’d speculated upon a gravitic shift as the body adjusted between two localities in “overlapping” warp space, hypothesised upon the presence of emitted “waste” energy, sound and heat, and theorized upon the effects of matter occluded by existing dense material upon transmission.

He had not expected a blinding discharge of light, a sharp tug in all directions at once, the bewildering sensation of falling, then a coalescing series of sensory feedbacks containing screams, fountaining blood and the unpalatable aroma of singed hair. It didn’t take him long to conclude, in fact, that something had gone wrong.

The initial displace party had comprised five adepts of his order, several dozen armed servo skulls and a trio of combat servitors to provide a clearance security zone. The servo skulls, at least, had been delivered safely.

The servitors had arrived all at once in the same spot: a fascinating arrangement of meat and metal, fused together and segueing from state to state apparently at random. It had mewed twice, coughed, then toppled sideways with a lurch and — in as much as it had ever been alive — died.

Adepts Armill and Nyssen had, it would appear, been reconstituted beyond the limit of the locarus engine; pulped flesh and blood scattered in a perfect circle around the boundary of the safe zone. This hypothesis would seem to explain the damage to his own body: he estimated thirty-five per cent of his left limb had been breaching the safety perimeter upon materialisation, neatly amputating it below the elbow. Had he any pain centres remaining he suspected, the injury would be agonising.

Adept Idow’s fate had been stranger still. Natsan had theorized that the locarus safe zone had overlapped part of the tau engine bay’s bulkhead, delivering Idow into the wall. His astonished features, flayed to a ruddy red liquescence and splattered by molten metal, leaned from the structural panel as if breaking the surface of a vertical pool.

So, alone amongst the sentient transportees, he and Adept Tertius Rolan had survived the transition from the Enduring Blade to the alien vessel. Indignity upon indignity, it had fallen to them, lacking the combat servitors, to defend themselves against the xenogens — a tiresome business more suited to the plebeians of the Imperial guard, had they been present. Still, the task was quickly completed; those tau specimens already inhabiting the cavernous powercore were a craven breed of gangly air caste crew, easy pickings for his sanctified plasma pistol.

Thankfully, the delay had been nominal. Within minutes the storm-troopers from the first assault craft had converged on his position, completing his carefully prepared security arrangements.

The door into the tiered chamber had been sealed as comprehensively as was possible, preventing any tau troopers from entering. As far as Imperial intelligence was aware, the xenos possessed no teleport analogue technology, so there’d be no danger from that direction. Further, he had released two dozen of the armed servo-skulls into the ductways around the enginebay to patrol against any surreptitious entry from that quarter.

The storm-troopers were deployed carefully across the lower levels of the power core, taking up position around the trunklike pillar at its centre which, he guessed, was the taus’ bizarre equivalent of a generarium reactor. The gantries and mezzanines which rose in platformed tiers around it had taken a while to climb in his hunt for a central console, his augmented frame not designed for such athletic exertion. The view from the summit was breathtaking.

And finally, as if any living creature could penetrate so far, the upper levels of the construct, where he and Adept Rolan swiftly and silently worked to cripple the vessel’s engines and decrypt its datavised secrets, were bordered by a coruscating energy field. Natsan’s aggressive assault upon the vessel’s AI, a heretical intelligence that would be purged the instant it was no longer required, had yielded fruit quickly: he’d identified and implemented the shield device as a final, utterly impenetrable defence.

Thus reassured, he gathered the full enormity of his mental faculties— reasoning that such comprehensive security arrangements negated any need to spend time considering his safety — and focused on the console before him. The datum drones at his side blinked and chattered, ferociously eating away at the AI’s defences. The language decryption paradigm running in Natsan’s head decoded a string of characters and he stabbed at a sequence of controls, exposing yet another level of sophistication. Like some energistic equivalent of the gantry surrounding the powercore, the ship’s logic engine was a structured gem: a perfectly aligned arrangement of operative tiers and commands, symmetrical and cohesive. Had his sense of awe been complete, he suspected, he might actually be impressed by the technology’s complexity. As it was, the puritens surgery released a stream of disapproving endorphins into his mind, filling him with revulsion and making him all the more aware of the xenogens’ blatant disregard for the proper obeisance owed to the Machine God.

To his side, Adept Rolan controlled a group of servo-skulls as they swarmed around the thrumming engine pile at the centre of the tier stack. The technology contained within that single pillar of silent componentry was utterly foreign, an impure antithesis of the arcane knowledge of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Natsan’s brief glimpse through a viewing portal had raised more questions than it provided answers, revealing a luminous green liquid gas swirling with convection currents and speckled by drifting, glowing particles of matter. When the tau vessel was captured he would relish uncovering its secrets.

So rigid was the careful distribution of his concentration that he was completely oblivious to the heavy clang of the engine bay doors unlocking, drifting open with a rasp. His ears — sensory ganglia improved years earlier by cranial implants — competently recorded the unmistakable sounds of hellguns chattering angrily, but his consciousness was busy elsewhere and the harsh frequencies went unprocessed.