This attack was not just to prove the capability of the Raptors, it was a chance for him to demonstrate to his brother, and the rest of the Legion, that he was as determined to press this war against the traitors as any warrior who had seen his battle-brothers cut down on Isstvan V.

‘Thermal scans show the enemy are responding in force towards the southern attack.’ Corax spoke slowly and calmly. The primarch had not joined the attack in person, preferring to observe proceedings from the Avengerin orbit over Cruciax’s largest moon. The gas giant itself could just about be seen as a large arc of dark red beyond the jagged line of mountains behind the monitoring post.

‘Hold position, draw fire,’ Branne ordered his companions. They had made great display of their landing and first attack, but theirs was a diversionary assault designed to bring the Word Bearers to one side of the compound. Meanwhile, another force was approaching on the opposite side, from atop the cliff, unseen by the defenders.

A bolt cracked into Branne’s right arm. Splinters of ceramite pattered against his chest and faceplate. He saw that an access door had been opened about fifty metres to his right, from which a squad of red-clad Word Bearers was pouring fire into his three squads from the flank. One of Nal’s legionaries went down, pitching face first into the sand. Another spun to the ground a second later, arcs of energy crackling from a punctured backpack.

Switching his grip to his left hand, the commander fired back with a salvo of ten rounds. Kavin swung his autocannon onto this new threat before Branne had spoken the order. Autocannon rounds punched into the squad sheltering in the doorway, felling a Word Bearer and forcing the others out of sight.

Branne glanced at the secondary chronometer display in his visor: 22.03 seconds until the main attack was in place.

‘Keep it up! Keep them busy!’ he yelled. The Raptors would not be allowed to fall short of the standards demanded by the Raven Guard. He would not be found wanting either.

THE TOP OF the escarpment was littered with loose rocks, but it did not hamper the legionaries as they bounded across along the slope with long strides. As part of the Ravendelve garrison, Sergeant Dor’s squad had been temporarily attached to the Raptors, honorary members it seemed, and so Alpharius found himself descending on the Word Bearers outpost alongside the warriors of the Raven Guard.

It was a strange feeling, almost as odd as the sensation he had felt when the primarch had given the order to open fire at the dropsite ambush. They had been warned then of the plan to back Horus’s defiance of the Emperor, but the reality of firing on another Legion had quite surprised Alpharius. Far from being shocked by it, he had found it liberating. Decades of being overshadowed by the extravagant exploits of the other Legions had built up in him a resentment that he had not acknowledged until the moment he first pulled the trigger.

There had been a sense of vindication then, but now Alpharius was feeling more pragmatic. The Word Bearers had proclaimed their loyalty so loudly, had spouted their liturgies and oaths so proudly, it was perhaps their rebellion that was the most unseemly and least like true legionaries. Alpharius had always thought they had protested their dedication to the Imperial cause too much, and when he had found out they would be siding with Horus it had come as no surprise.

They were allies, as much as any of the Legions that had collaborated to destroy the Emperor’s task force, but that didn’t mean Alpharius had to like the bombastic, preaching turncoats. He could well imagine them extolling the praises and virtues of Horus as loudly as they had once proclaimed the righteousness of the Emperor. Of all those who had taken part in the massacre, it was the Word Bearers he considered the most hypocritical.

‘Ready for drop,’ announced Sergeant Dor.

They were almost at the lip of the cliff overlooking the facility. Two hundred Raptors, and twenty of the former Talons, surged through the sandstorm.

The Raptors were a strange sight with their beaked facemasks and new armour, looking the part of hunting birds of prey. Alpharius had already accessed the technical schematics of the new Mark VI armour, and was waiting for the opportunity to upload them to Omegon. It was probably not much of a revelation, considering the tendrils Horus had infiltrated into the Mechanicum, but how much of that information the Warmaster was willing to share with the Alpha Legion was questionable.

A squad to Alpharius’s right reached the edge of the cliff first. They carried on, leaping into the swirling sand. Alpharius took a breath and followed, hurling himself into thin air. The roof of the compound was twenty-three metres below, a distance that posed little problem to a fully armoured legionary even in normal gravity, and that of Cruciax’s moon was two-thirds Terran standard.

Clouds of dust billowed up as Alpharius thudded onto the pitted rockcrete roof. The fibre bundles in his armour bunched as he landed, a sudden flicker of systems reports scrolling past his right eye.

‘Meltas!’ said Dor, pulling one of the charges from his belt. Alpharius did the same, slapping the melta bomb onto the roof in front of him and setting the timer for three seconds.

He stepped back half a dozen paces and readied his bolter in one hand while arming a frag grenade in the other. With a white-hot detonation, the melta charge blasted through the rockcrete, creating a hole just over a metre across. Dor’s bomb went off half a second later, widening the gap. All around him, the Raptors were doing likewise, opening up cracks across the compound. Alpharius tossed the grenade into the opening. He grabbed his bolter in both hands and jumped down through the breach as he heard the crack of the fragmentation charge detonating.

Tiles split underfoot from the impact of his landing. There was dust everywhere, the floor littered with shards of rockcrete that crunched as he took a step. The only light came from the breach above, the harsh glare creating a column of blue around him. With a glance in front and behind, he found himself in a short corridor, open archways at each end. He stepped forwards again, aiming ahead as Sergeant Dor dropped into the station. Alpharius swung his bolter to the right as a door opened a little way ahead of him, but he relaxed his finger on the trigger as he recognised the distinctive profile of a Raptor in the gloom.

The bark of a bolter ahead spurred Alpharius into action. With the rest of the squad thudding down behind them, he and Dor advanced on the archway, five Raptors emerging from a side room to join them.

A figure appeared at the archway. In the swirl of dust it was impossible to tell friend from foe and Alpharius checked his fire. The warrior ahead took a couple of steps closer, revealing a legionary clad in crimson armour. There was something strange about him, a hunched look that unsettled Alpharius.

Dor opened fire first, the Raptors adding their own salvoes an instant later. The Word Bearer stumbled backwards out of sight, pieces of armour flying in all directions.

‘Come on!’ shouted Dor, breaking into a run. ‘Clear out this room.’

Alpharius followed on his heels, bursting through the archway with his finger already tightening on the trigger of his bolter. He swung the weapon left at a pair of legionaries crouching by the shattered sill of a window. His first blast ripped into the backpack of the closest. The second was aimed higher and crashed into the Word Bearer’s sculpted helmet.

Or at least that was what Alpharius had first thought.

The Word Bearer toppled sideways, blood pouring from his shattered skull. What Alpharius had taken as an ornate helm was no such thing – the Word Bearer’s head was misshapen, a small horn protruding from his brow, canine teeth jutting down to his chin. His skin was bronze-coloured and the blood that pumped from the hole in his skull was black and thick.