No craftsman had deemed the design worthy of attaching his name, and Remus wasn’t surprised. This aircraft had all the hallmarks of servitor-assembled work, and that he was forced to trust his life to it didn’t make him feel any better. The stamp of the Mechanicum was acid-etched onto the bulkhead beside him, and Remus touched it for good luck.

‘I saw that,’ said Barkha. ‘Superstitious are you?’

The question was lightly asked, but Remus heard the warning behind it, the suggestion that his answer should be carefully chosen. Barkha would be quite within his rights to condemn his superior officer for conduct unbecoming an Ultramarines warrior. Even now, in the midst of a combat situation.

Especially now.

‘No, but I take reassurance from the fact they believe in this machine enough to mark it with their seal.’

‘It’s probably the only thing holding it together,’ observed Barkha as the gunship banked around one of the sun-baked agri-silos of Quintarn. Spars of light from the vision blocks inset in the gunship’s fuselage swayed with the motion, and Remus felt something shear from the underside of the craft. Impact or system failure? His heart lurched as the gunship dropped, its wings passing within a metre of the silver-skinned silo.

‘Target ahead,’ came a voice over the internal vox, sounding strained with the effort of holding the bucking craft steady. The timbre of the pilot’s voice told Remus exactly what the crew of this new craft made of it. A Stormbird had weight behind it, a solidity that made it a pleasure to fly and a safely cocooned means of transporting the killer Legionaries where they needed to be.

Remus linked his helmet’s inloaders with the forward picters mounted in the gunship’s prow, seeing the pristine symmetry of Idrisia, one of the most central of the great agricultural hydropolis cities of Quintarn. Though given over to the utilitarian need for crops and industry, the city was still beautiful in its own way, with majestic towers, pillared hangars and marble-fronted meeting halls. Its street plan overlaid his vision, a masterful arrangement of function and aesthetic. Like most things in Ultramar, the primarch had turned his genius to the design and layout of its cities.

Too bad he hadn’t turned it to the design of this gunship.

Enemy strongpoints within the city were marked in red, and Remus saw how deeply they had sunk their fiery claws into the metropolis. City fighting was where this particular enemy excelled, with a propensity for weaponry that functioned best at short to mid range and could burn through cover as though it didn’t exist.

This would be the most testing battle yet. The others had driven them to the point of defeat before the primarch’s great work had proved its worth. It had done so time and time again, in engagement after engagement. The 4th Company was by no means the only company now armed with their primarch’s incredible achievement. Even as the 4th Company’s aerial assault drew closer to its target, other companies were engaged in varied theatres of war with the enemy on Quintarn.

But Remus felt sure that he and his warriors were the ones who would be watched the closest to see whether its teachings would embed in their psyche.

In some circles they were known as the Troublesome Fourth, a company known for its daredevil actions, heroic follies and the personal bravery of its individual warriors. If the primarch’s work could be made to stick with the 4th Company, then it would stick anywhere.

And after Calth…

Where the 4th Company led, the other battle companies followed.

Remus switched out of his tactical view as the gunship juddered and the pilot jinked it to the side in a series of gut-wrenching evasion manoeuvres. The ready light above the forward assault ramp flashed from red to green and Remus slammed his palm against the gravity harness. The restraint lifted up and over his head, and he retrieved his bolter from the niche beside him. The Thunderhawk might be a ramshackle piece of junk, but it had cleverly designed stowage that at least made it functional.

‘Fourth!’ yelled Remus. ‘Touchdown in fifteen seconds.’

Thirty warriors filled the interior of the Thunderhawk, a force capable of meeting most enemy forces with a high degree of certainty that they would destroy it. Yet it felt strange to Remus to be going into battle without at least fifty warriors at his back. Warfare wasn’t about being fair or acknowledging the honour of your opponent, it was about crushing him into the dust with overwhelming force. Few enemies would survive the attention of fifty warriors of the Ultramarines.

True, not many would survive an attack by thirty, but the point still rankled.

Remus took his place at the front of the assault ramp, as the pitch of the gunship’s engines changed and the pilot brought it to a shrieking hover. The ramp dropped and the dry heat of scorched stone and hot metal filled the compartment. As powerful as those smells were, they couldn’t compete with the reek of synthetic fertilisers, chemical soil additives, the rich scent of turned earth and thousands of acres of crops. Remus charged out, his warriors forming up in perfectly aligned squads to either side of him. They spread out, keeping low to avoid the searing jetwash from the Thunderhawk.

They were on a roof, seared black and reeking of burning propellant. Green-armoured bodies lay unmoving at the roof parapets, and Remus saw numerous missile tubes amid the clusters of the fallen.

‘Good landing kills,’ said Barkha, following his gaze.

‘True,’ replied Remus. He hadn’t felt the Thunderhawk’s nose guns firing, but supposed that was only natural. To effect an assault drop in a hot landing zone was a difficult and risky manoeuvre, but the guns of the Thunderhawk had efficiently cleared their insertion point of hostiles. He almost pulled up short at that last thought. It had been easy enough to submerge himself in the immediacy of his previous engagements, but this operation was very different.

‘Something the matter, captain?’ asked Barkha. ‘We need to keep moving. We’ve caught them by surprise, but that won’t last.’

‘I’m fine,’ Remus assured him, taking a last look at the bodies and shaking his head. The unthinkable had become a very real threat, and it was beholden to him to keep what was at stake in mind at all times. The nature of the opponent didn’t matter. All that mattered was the outcome. The Ultramarines had to fight, and they had to win.

The stakes had never been higher.

Victory ensured the survival of the most precious thing in the galaxy.

Defeat would see it snuffed out forever, never to be seen again.

Remus shook off thoughts that had no bearing on this fight. He was a captain of the Ultramarines and had a job to do. The enemy command post was located in this structure, and taking it out was key to the primarch’s overall strategy. Weeks of probing, cipher-breaking and after-action interpretation had allowed Ultramarines strategic planners to plot the most probable deployments of the enemy command and control elements. With the war for Quintarn still hanging in the balance, the time to make use of that predictive intelligence had arrived.

As armoured elements engaged the leading edge of the dug-in defenders, Remus led his thirty warriors in a precise strike to decapitate the enemy command structure. Intercepted code transmissions indicated that the senior enemy commander was in theatre and this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Remus knew the layout of this structure intimately, and led his warriors towards the armoured blockhouse that contained the stairwell to the upper cloister. He kept low and hugged the parapet, his bolter aimed at the door. It didn’t make sense for the enemy to venture out, but these weren’t Ultramarines. Who could say how recklessly they would behave?