‘Let that be my concern. If we have to leave it then so be it. I’ll wreck the weapon myself, and we’ll have lost nothing. What we scavenged from that drop-ship is all we have, Numeon.’

‘Each other, Shen, thatis all we have.’

‘Agreed,’ said the Techmarine. ‘All the more reason to bolster that with a track-mounted cannon.’

Numeon shook his head at Shen’ra. Between Leodrakk’s petulance and the Techmarine’s tenacity, he wondered which would get him killed first.

‘You have ten minutes,’ he said, and went to assist Domadus in coordinating the rest of the breakdown.

‘They are leaving,’ Dagon hissed over the vox.

Narek had the vehicle yard under surveillance through his scope. As suspected, remnants of the three Legions they had helped decimate on Isstvan V had been responsible for the deaths of four of his brothers.

A reinforced gate separated the vehicle yard from the street. It was roofless but walled. Beyond it there was an outer yard, a tarmac apron upon which traffic could be logged in and out. It too was walled, but peaked around waist height and crested by a wire mesh that wouldn’t stop an arrow, let alone a mass-reactive shell.

He’d just seen a Salamander slam through the gate. He looked unhappy.

‘Tempers are fraying,’ he muttered to himself, before answering Dagon, ‘Someone must have spotted us at the ambush site and guessed we’d follow.’ Narek remembered the cooling tower, and the sense of someone watching. Now he knew his instincts hadn’t been lying. Perhaps he was not as blunt as he first thought.

‘ Do we engage?’ Dagon asked.

‘Not yet. I’ll advance, get a closer look. You stay high and maintain overwatch.’

Narek reattached the scope to his rifle, slung it over his shoulder and began to move. Just before entering the street, he cast a quick glance at the smoke stack where Dagon was positioned far above him and then headed out.

Crouched low, Narek moved quickly and stuck to the shadows. The enemy might have sentries, or the one that had seen them earlier might be watching. Having gained a distance of two hundred metres up the street, he ducked into a side alley and from there a domicile, breaking in quietly through a back door.

There were bodies inside. Dried blood painted the walls, dark and shiny. The lights were out, smashed. Furniture was upturned. An elderly man and a young woman had been cut open. Viscera glistened in the ambient light flooding in from outside through a smashed window, the blinds designed to shroud it bent and broken.

A marking was described in the blood. The octed – a star with eight points.

Elias had ensured that the cults were well secreted until their calling came. Narek could see the look of surprise and horror still etched on the young woman’s face. The older man wore a death grimace. Heart attack, he presumed.

Staying low, Narek advanced to the broken window. Vantage was good. Nothing in the way of line of sight. He had an uninterrupted trajectory to the vehicle yard. Cover in the room was satisfactory too. He pulled over a section of the broken blind to further conceal his presence. Then he crouched on one knee, bracing the muzzle of his rifle on the window lip, and aimed down the scope. The errant Salamander slipped straight into his crosshairs.

He reopened the vox-link.

‘In position.’

‘ Orders?’

‘Four kills for four kills. Wait until they make egress out onto the street, then I’ll give the signal.’

‘ Confirmed.’

Dagon cut the link.

Now all they had to do was wait.

The shot, when it came, was muffled by the explosion from the det-cord.

At first it appeared as if the medic had slipped, but for the geyser of blood erupting from his ruined gorget.

The Salamander crumpled to his knees, gurgling and frothing through his vox-grille, the warrior nearest to him reaching for his comrade’s flailing arm and simultaneously alerting the others to the attack.

Grammaticus felt a strong pressure against his back as the psyker, Hriak, pushed him to the ground.

The assertion that time moved slowly during a crisis was actually true. It was the way that the brain managed to order and cope with the ensuing trauma, enabling the body to react as quickly as it could to protect itself from harm.

In the glacially slow seconds that elapsed between Grammaticus being upright and then taking stock of his new situation, several things happened at once.

Numeon shouted the order to grab cover, pointing to the low wall surrounding the tarmac apron where the company had assembled. A data-slate on which he’d been reviewing a secondary base location was mag-locked to his thigh plate, whilst the other hand reached for a sidearm holstered at his belt.

Domadus went into a brace position, slowly turning his heavy cannon so it faced outwards towards the street and the buildings beyond.

Pergellen had been on point with the Techmarine. Both stayed down, the former scanning the darkened city for suppressed muzzle flash; the latter putting his back against the wall and lighting up a control panel on his gauntlet. The two were exchanging curt responses but, deafened by the shouting and the strange, almost subterranean filter his brain was putting on his hearing, Grammaticus could discern none of it.

He hit the ground a fraction later than the shot Salamander. The legionary dropped hard, like a felled tree, spitting blood, a pool of which was expanding from the shattered artery in his neck.

‘ S-t-a-y… d-o-w-n…’

Hriak shouted at him, the pysker’s words slowed by sensory distortion.

As soon as he felt the earth beneath his hands and elbows, time resumed at its normal pace for Grammaticus.

‘Don’t move from here,’ said Hriak, drawing a weapon as he moved up to support his brothers. Grammaticus watched him, followed him all the way to the low wall where another Salamander was hunkered down.

The Salamander popped up, bolter flaring in an effort to provide covering fire. A second shot pinned him as he rose, jerking his aim and piercing his chest. He fell back, perforated and unmoving.

More shouting, this time from Numeon to Leodrakk, who was edging closer to the end of the wall, shaping like he was going to attempt a dash across the street into deeper cover and then seek out their attackers from there.

‘Hold!’ Numeon bellowed at him, his voice tinny and urgent through his vox-grille.

Domadus was still scanning, the concentric scoping rings in his bionic eye whirring as they focused and refocused on different targets.

The Salamanders medic was being dragged away by two other legionaries when a third shot came from the darkness. It pitched one of the Raven Guard over, spinning him with the force of entry, ripping a death shriek from his lips.

‘Stay down,’ called Hriak, putting out his hand, telling Grammaticus not to move.

‘No arguments from me,’ muttered Grammaticus, and threw himself flat.

‘Glint of metal. I see him, on the rooftop. Thirty degrees east. Range, eighty metres.’

Pergellen’s assessment came through Numeon’s vox.

There were seven metres between them, and Numeon saw the scout was dirtying up his scope, trying to hide the tells that had exposed the enemy sniper.

‘Difficult to get line of sight in this warren. We’ll come around, take his blind side.’

‘ Wait,’ warned Pergellen. He glanced at the three dead legionaries, now alone and bleeding out in the open. ‘ Trajectories suggest two firing positions.’

‘Two gunmen,’ Numeon replied grimly.

Pergellen nodded.

‘Permission to return fire,’ shouted Domadus. He was standing against a pillar just inside the vehicle apron, heavy bolter primed for auto-fire.

‘Negative. You’ll be cut down before you can engage the trigger.’

‘We can’t stay pinned like this,’ snapped Leodrakk, six metres from Numeon on the opposite end of the wall.