A corridor stretched in front of him. The air hazed with the heat of conflagration. Again, the ship bucked. Not long now before impact. He glanced back at the woman.

The vox alongside him crackled to life, the pilot’s last words.

‘ …ing down. Brace… selves… impact. Emperor… preserve us…’

Detached and calm, even in the face of imminent and violent landfall, Heka’tan found the last remark curious. It sounded almost like a prayer.

The engine drone became a scream. For a few seconds, Heka’tan remembered… The screaming, the death and blood. ‘Hell made real’ – they were Gravius’s words. Heka’tan staggered, but not from weakness or fatigue. He staggered at the memory of it, of that place where so many had died and so much had gone wrong.

Father.

The thought was a painful one, forming unbidden.

Vulkan was alone. He was alone and surrounded. They were coming for him. He was… he…

…shook his head to banish the nightmare. The smoke in the chamber and the corridor was thickening. Heka’tan heard shouting above the roar of the flames. The desperate ship was arrowing through the sky too fast, too steep. Its sides shuddered hard, presaging a terminal impact.

A sudden change in pitch signalled the ship was coming to the end of its fiery trajectory. The hold was ahead. Heka’tan was halfway down the corridor when he realised he wouldn’t make it in time. Arcadese would have to protect the others, assuming he wasn’t already dead.

‘I’m coming, human…’ he muttered, turning on his heel and racing back through the door. At least he could save one life.

As Heka’tan embraced her, the Stormbird hit the ground with all the force of a drop-pod and the world exploded into hell and fire.

II

EARLIER…

Persephia eyed her master with fear.

Hulking plates, edged with gold, sat atop his shoulders. A blade as thick and long as her arm was strapped to the warrior’s thigh. Cobalt metal armoured his form. She found only cold grey stone in the giant’s eyes, glaring back at her with piercing intensity, and looked down again.

The Immortal Emperor’s Legiones Astartes, His Angels of Death – no, that wasn’t right – hisAngels of Death, created to protect mankind from threats beyond the stars. A billion, billion worlds; a million, million cultures all compliant – now at war.

Who will protect us from ourselves? Persephia wondered, keeping her eyes on the shaking deck. Who will protect us from you?

War was everywhere, or so it seemed, so the propagandists, the rabble-rousers and Imperial Army press-gangers would have the galaxy believe. Where then the promised era of prosperity and peace made possible through the pre-eminent Imperium? The reality was a galaxy divided.

Join the Emperor, a distant, untouchable figure – after all, who beyond His favoured sons had ever even seen Him? – or be denounced as traitor. Heretic.

No, that wasn’t right again.

Great pains had been taken to assert the empirical fact that the Emperor was not a god. There were no gods.

The propagators, the pamphleteers, had not been seen or heard from again. Idolatry was to be stamped out – science and reason were the future; logic would bring the human race to its apex, and yet… there were whispers.

And what of the other choice? Horus. Warmonger, planet-killer, ruthless demagogue of a bloody crusade allied to old religion, old faith. The smear campaign had been waged with military brutality on Terra. Vilified, demonised, Horus was a monster, a thing of childhood nightmares. How quickly the gilded could fall.

‘Be still,’ said the cobalt giant.

Persephia could barely hear her own thoughts above the droning engines, let alone her actual voice. The giant had heard her as easily as if they were engaged in polite conversation in a quiet room. And his voice had carried with all the force of a thunderclap.

‘My lord?’

‘I said, be still,’ the giant repeated. He had a stylised ‘U’ on his chest plate. A curved helmet, with a vox-grille for a mouth and cold crimson lenses, sat mag-locked to his thigh. Even without his full complement of weapons, secure in the ship’s locker, he was still formidable.

‘The vessel you’re riding in is a Stormbird – though, it scarcely resembles one any more – it has endured harder journeys.’

Persephia was humble and contrite. ‘Yes, my lord. I’m sorry.’

Seemingly satisfied, the warrior shifted back in his grav-harness but was no less threatening. Bionics beneath his armour whirred as he moved, betraying old injuries. It was why the giant had missed out on front-line duties and part of the reason Persephia accompanied him. She had once been an artisan, but since the Edict of Dissolution her role as a remembrancer was a memory long dead. War had come to the galaxy and Persephia’s talents were put to the forge like the rest of the human race.

No one wanted to remember any more.

A bout of turbulence rocked the ship, causing Persephia to stumble.

The pilot’s voice came from the cockpit through the vox.

‘Entering Bastion’s atmosphere. Experiencing wind shear. Attempting to correct.’

Persephia’s gaze alighted on the cobalt giant. His eyes were closed, his respiration barely visible in the movement of his chest.

‘I am not supposed to be here, not like this.’ She clenched her fists tightly, willing the turbulence to abate.

‘You and I have something in common, human. Neither of us should be here. We’ve both been left behind.’ His eyes snapped open, tainted with hurt and anger. ‘Heka’tan’s meditations are almost over. He will have need of his armour.’ The giant closed his eyes again as the artificer moved towards the back of the ship. His sonorous voice followed her.

‘Forgotten… both of us.’

III

HEKA’TAN WAS NAKED but for a pair of training fatigues. He had prepared the ash and the brazier. He had observed the rites and warmed the branding iron. The flame was born in the cradle, and within its blazing grasp he found purity and a sense of truth. Repressed memory came with it…

The drop-ship was taking fire from all sides. Much of its armour plating was punched through by lascannon blasts and several of its heavy bolter armaments were destroyed. Heat emanated from the interior. Shadows lurked there, of broken bodies silhouetted a visceral red from the incendiary fires inside. The guts of the ship lay strewn across the Isstvan plain where a cloying fug of smoke roiled. Hot tracer whickered through air screaming with the discharge of bolters and heavy cannon. Somewhere in the distance, by a shrouded ridgeline, an explosion blossomed.

‘Ta… king… vy… ire…’ The broken vox report crackled in Heka’tan’s ear.

‘Gravius! Is that you, brother?’

‘Affir… mative, brother… aptain…’

‘Fall back immediately and assume defensive postures.’

Around him, the fight was intensifying. Gunfire, scores of overlapping bolter bursts, rose to a deafening frenzy. Enemy cohorts were massing from the east and west, and advancing on their position.

Enemy cohorts.

The notion was insane, a crazed nightmare brought to life on a dead world with only the dead to witness it. For surely, that’s what they all were.

‘Brother… aptain…’ There was a pause not caused by the static interference.

Figures were resolving through the artificial fog. Their hulking forms wore the colour of hard steel, of grey unyielding metal. Iron.

The Urgall Depression was no place for a last stand. The ravine resembled a charnel field and not a place about which great deeds were sung. There would be no glory, face down in the blood-drenched tundra slain by one’s own brothers.