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  Cataclysm. Creation and destruction were one. The possibility of the greatest storm, one that would sweep the cosmos before it, hovered at the edge of realisation. Then the world returned. Ghazan was lying at the base of a piston. He was wedged deeply into buckled metal. He had been hurled here like a cannon shell, though he had no memory of the violence. Above him, he saw the shell around the Stompa’s engine fractured like an eggshell. Light from the heart of a violent green star shone through the cracks, outlining the corpse of the ork psyker.

  The light pulsed harder. Something in the core of the Stompa was screaming to be born.

  Ghazan pried himself free of the metal. His face was badly burned, and he could feel bones moving in his torso. There was a gun emplacement just above him. He climbed into it and out of the shutter.

  The eldar prisoner was looking at him. Ghazan walked across the teleporter platform, past the strewn bodies of the orks. Behind him, the humming whine of the Stompa’s approaching death continued to build.

  Merentallas was a powerful psyker. That was clear, even with his strength shackled to the machine. He would have to be formidable, if he alone was enough to teleport something as big as the Stompa. His body had been greatly weakened by his imprisonment. It also seemed to be undergoing a transformation. The eldar had a quality of translucence, as if he were a liminal form between flesh and crystal. He spoke to Ghazan in Gothic, and his voice was crystalline too, a distant chime at the end of a long tunnel. ‘Are they all dead?’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Though the army is not defeated.’

  ‘No. The main force is on the offensive.’

  The eldar nodded, accepting a fact he had already known. ‘Then do not free me. The orks must not triumph in this system.’

  ‘They will not,’ Ghazan assured him.

  ‘You have no idea how vital their defeat is.’ His smile was bitter. ‘I envy you, human. I envy your wealth of choices.’

  ‘I had none today.’

  ‘You did. You found the path to your victory. I thought I had a choice. I do not. To stop the orks here, I must place my faith in the future choices of your species.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  The psyker looked past Ghazan’s shoulder at the Stompa. ‘The end of that vehicle is almost upon us. If you want to save your fellows who are fighting the ork army, you should alert them.’ He closed his eyes. His body contracted in on itself. Psychic energy crackled.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ghazan demanded.

  ‘What I must.’

  The teleporter platform began to hum.

  Ghazan opened the vox-channel to Temur.

  The warning came to retreat behind the bastion walls. ‘We are already there,’ Meixner told Temur. There were still Battlewagons in the field, and the thousands of orks that had arrived in a wave had swept the remains of the Iron Guard away. The Thunderhawk had succeeded in killing one more tank, but it was limping through the air, one engine smoking. The White Scars assault squad had delayed the orks long enough for what was left of the Iron Guard to retreat to the final defensive position. But that was all. The moves were finished.

  The bastion was crumbling. Its walls had been hammered by cannon fire. They were plasteel and rockcrete rubble now. Cover behind which to shoot. Nothing more. Meixner had a panoramic view of the orks massing on the plain below the plateau, and the tanks moving towards its base. He imagined his command would exist for at most another hour.

  There was a flash at the far end of the plain. Meixner’s jaw dropped. The Stompa towered above the field. The orks cheered its arrival. A green wave prepared to rise up and swallow the bastion.

  Meixner wondered why the Stompa wasn’t moving.

  Temur’s warning kept coming over the vox: Take cover. Take cover. Take cover.

  Meixner dropped behind his chunk of wall.

  A green sun incinerated the plain with its birth cry.

  Epilogue

  Merentallas was dead. The energy that the teleporter had drained from him had reduced him to a husk. Ghazan stood for a moment before the body, honouring the sacrifice. Then he crossed the cavern. On the other side was a tunnel that had been concealed by the Stompa. Cables ran into it from the teleporter pad. After the Stompa had vanished, the machine had not shut down right away. It had dragged a few more seconds of use out of its captive. There had been a second energy burst in the tunnel.

  The passage was a short one. At its end was a small cavern. In it was another platform, just large enough for an individual. There was also another set of controls. Ghazan stared at the device, a sick certainty in his gut. He was still there when the brotherhood arrived.

  Temur joined him. ‘I have heard from the Khajog’s Stand. The orks have been exterminated.’

  Ghazan nodded. ‘Good.’

  ‘You seem troubled.’

  Ghazan gestured at the teleporter. ‘I believe the ork engineer has escaped. We have only half a victory.’

  ‘We will send a warning to the Raven Guard planetside,’ said Temur. He hesitated. ‘Or is your fate tied to that ork, too?’

  ‘It isn’t,’ Ghazan said. The tugging of destiny that had driven him to this system had ceased. He felt a sense of release, a pause between the commands of his visions.

  ‘You were right,’ Temur said. ‘I should not have doubted your judgement.’

  Ghazan laughed softly. ‘The line between judgement and compulsion is a thin one.’

  But there is one, he thought. He remembered the moment when he had glimpsed the force that was feeding the ork witch. He had turned away from making that power his own.

  He saw his path ahead with a new clarity.

  He had chosen his compulsion, and the choice had been real.

  He had chosen the storm.

  Shadow Captain

  Prologue

  The orks raced over their dead. They trampled the fallen, crushed bodies to pulp beneath treads and wheels, and left a wake of their own blood with every metre of their advance. Their battle joy raged. It shook the air itself.

  The aggression wave travelled ahead of the horde. It was a continuous battering. There was no adapting to it. The furious revel kept growing. The wave built on itself, a monstrous, mountainous psychic shock that never crested and never troughed, yet crashed and crashed and crashed against the eldar. The orks rode the crest of the wave, howling with the glee of absolute destruction. They came to smash and sever, shoot and burn. They came for a violence so pure, victory was incidental.

  That would not make it any less real. Or catastrophic.

  Though they died by the hundreds, the orks didn’t care. They were ecstatic. The deaths didn’t matter. And they were closing in on the city. Though they could not know what its capture truly meant, that didn’t matter either.

  The orks raced over their dead, and they raced towards victory.

  Perched in the high branches of a conifer at the edge of a narrow forest, Alathannas pulled the trigger of his long rifle with a steady rhythm. Every second, he dropped another ork, taking his prey out with a concentrated energy bolt between the eyes. He chose the big targets. The larger the ork, the more authority it wielded. His hope: kill enough leaders to create confusion in the ranks and slow down the advance.

  The reality: there were so many big orks. Too many.

  On the plain before him, the warriors of Saim-Hann fought to stem the green tide. Jetbikes streaked the length of the front lines, their shuriken catapults shredding the orks into strips. They were supported by a squadron of Vypers, whose rear-mounted bright lances struck at the ork battlewagons. The harvest of death was immense. The eldar irrigated the plain with ork blood. And the brutes came on. The war-fire in their veins burned ever higher. Nothing would turn them back. Only total annihilation would stop them.

  It would also be the one thing that would end the Saim-Ha
nn struggle. Alathannas would snipe his prey until he was ground beneath the wheels of the ork tanks. And that, he knew, was his likely end. The orks had the numbers for a war of extermination. The eldar did not.

  Alathannas fought the temptation to look behind. He knew what there was to see. Nothing would have changed. If it had, if the thing he both hoped and feared was transpiring, he would hear the change. If he turned his head, he would miss an opportunity for at least one more precious kill. In exchange, all he would see would be the reminder of how little space and how little time the Saim-Hann had left.

  The forest was barely a hundred metres wide. It ran north and south a few thousand metres in either direction from the ranger’s position, marking the end of the plain. The land sloped downwards through the trees. Beyond the forest was an even narrower strip of barren, rocky ground, ending at a deep gorge. The river at the bottom was a thin ribbon. The bridge that spanned the gorge was the only access to the western side of the city.

  The city whose beauty had died millennia before. The city that was now a brutal cluster of human spires. The city that had become an aesthetic scab on the surface of the planet.

  The city that the orks must not take.

  Alathannas aimed and fired, aimed and fired. Every kill was a handful of water taken from the ocean. Every shot was a denial of the futility of what he was doing. Every pull of the trigger was an act of defiance. He was fighting as hard against his own despair as he was against the orks.

  Despair. The state had the toxic allure of simple logic. In the adjacent system, the orks and tyranids clashed, destroying each other by the millions, and thus strengthening each other. The orks were spilling out of their empire, and now they had come to this system. Perhaps their initial incursion had been the result of luck. The improbable played a dismayingly crucial role in the successes of the orks.

  The first orks into the system were a terrible sign. The first on the planet were catastrophic. Alathannas was sure that the orks did not understand how important the world was to them. Their understanding, though, was irrelevant. They wanted the world, and so they would take it, and given enough time, in the end, they would find the secret.

  In the end. Yes, that would be the end. For uncountable systems. Alathannas could bring himself to face the material destruction that would follow. He refused to imagine the spiritual damage that would strike the eldar.

  The one comfort that might come from failure on this day would be not living to see its consequences. But such comfort was cowardice. It was not on the path down which Alathannas was travelling.

  ‘I am here,’ he whispered. He was here for his kin. He had voyaged far from the craftworld. It had been so long since he had seen it that his memories of home were growing distant to him, curiosities without pain, and he knew that his emotional distance did not inspire trust. He could wish that his actions would prove his loyalty, though he had his doubts. He knew how important this mission was, and what its failure would mean. He felt the dread of those consequences so acutely that he nurtured a forbidden hope. Though he risked treason even to think of this event, he would welcome it.

  He could see how the battle was going. The orks were pushing the eldar back. In another few minutes, the Saim-Hann would be forced to fight in the woods. The wave of orks might break into foam in the trees, but the skimmers would be hampered, too. The horde’s advance would continue. The orks would push the eldar to the bridge. This was inevitable. It was as true as if it had already happened.

  Now he felt a greater fatalism with each pull of the trigger. It might even be the despair after all. A battlewagon took out a Vyper with its big gun, brutish excess of explosive triumphing over the perfected art of war. The skimmer’s elegant flight turned into a rolling fireball, its pilot and gunner vanishing into the wraithbone pyre. The other Vypers slashed through the troops and concentrated their lances at the tank, bringing the energy to bear on a single point of the lower rear armour. They ruptured the fuel tank, ignited it, and rewarded fire with fire.

  But the green tide was endless. The front lines of the orks were ragged, but they were also amorphous, spreading like liquid across the plain, defying the eldar attempts to hold them back. The skimmers were no longer in front of the ork army. They were in its midst. There were more tanks coming, and ahead of them were the raving mechanical monsters that the orks created by wiring their kin into armoured cylinders. Piston legs smashed into the ground with all the pained rage of the pilots. Articulated metal arms with pincers or snarling blades for hands waved with hunger. The guns on either side of the cylinders unleashed a perpetual stream of projectiles whose size and velocity rendered their primitive nature irrelevant.

  The walkers were mad. And they were lethal. Even as the Vypers killed the battlewagon, three of the walkers lurched forwards with a sudden unity and surrounded a jetbike. The density of the orks was slowing the skimmers down, hampering their movement. The jetbike pilot, cut off from his squadron, tried to evade the orks. He couldn’t. Three pairs of arms fell on his ride. He was already dead before three of his comrades managed a return pass to come to his aid. They shot the arms off one of the walkers, but the central mass of the beast survived their attack. The cluster of cylinders turned as one. They met the jetbikes head-on. Their fire was unavoidable, devastating. Two of the skimmers, their pilots dead, slammed into the walkers. The conflagration spread wide, taking out the third jetbike and every ork within a dozen metres.

  Six eldar had died in the last few seconds compared to scores of orks.

  The advantage was to the orks.

  From a great distance, Alathannas realised he was whispering curses. He mouthed the oaths without emotion. He killed the orks without hope. Another few seconds, and he would have to retreat. The tide was lapping at the edge of the forest.

  Then, over the primal howl of the orks and the sear of energy bolts, he heard it. The event was beginning. His forbidden wish was coming to pass. Still he exercised discipline, and did not look towards the city until the orks were only moments away. He dropped down from his tree and ran deeper into the woods. Beneath his cameleoline cloak, he was almost invisible. Once their numbers were great enough, though, the orks wouldn’t have to see him to crush him beneath their onslaught.

  Alathannas reached the edge of the woods. He had a clear view across the gorge to the city, and of the territory to the south and west, on the other side of the river, where the elevation dropped and the river once more meandered through a plain. He saw the streaks in the sky. He gave himself a few seconds to observe the descent of tears of metal. The humans were coming. They were the one hope left against the orks.

  The ranger’s despair retreated. His dread, however, did not.

  It grew worse.

  Chapter One

  The command tent stood in the centre of the Raven Guard base. Its walls flapped sluggishly in the wind that blew over the wide plain. Inside, surrounded by his sergeants, Reszasz Krevaan leaned over the tacticarium table, eyeing the hololithic map of the region.

  ‘They’re flanking, Shadow Captain,’ Sergeant Behrasi said.

  Krevaan traced a route on the map leading down from the flash point at the bridge. ‘Sweeping around to the south?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, as expected.’

  ‘Any signs that they care about our presence?’ It was most likely that the orks had seen the drop pods come down, though he knew, given their single-minded focus on the eldar, that it was possible they were unaware of the Raven Guard’s presence. But he could not risk such an assumption. Krevaan did not believe in the ignorant act. Information was the most potent weapon he knew. The warrior in the dark required a battle-barge. The one with full knowledge of the enemy needed only a blade.

  ‘The greenskins appear to be focused on the eldar,’ Behrasi told him. ‘Not one of them has shown any interest in this location.’

  ‘Good. Thank you, brother-sergeant.’ He
thought for a moment while the rest of his sergeants waited. If the orks wanted a fight, they would find the Raven Guard Eighth Company ready. The drop pods had landed about a kilometre south of the city of Reclamation, and Krevaan had ordered the base established here. The location was nondescript. It was not a defensible position, a fact that held exactly no importance for Krevaan. The Raven Guard were on the attack on Lepidus Prime. If they wound up on the defence, then they had already failed their mission. The location was a useful one for its openness. Enemies would be visible from a great distance.

  ‘Have you reached my fellow captains?’ Krevaan asked Akrallas, who was operating the vox.

  ‘I have Captain Mulcebar. No luck with Temur Khan.’

  ‘Anything at all from the moon?’

  ‘Fragmentary. Some brief moments from the Mordian Iron Guard.’

  ‘Which leads me to guess you are hearing nothing good.’

  ‘It seems the orks have a great deal of heavy armour on the moon as well.’

  ‘The White Scars must be delighted,’ Krevaan muttered. He indulged in a moment of irony at the expense of the sons of Chogoris, but only a moment. Though the Raven Guard had no love for the White Scars, the difficulties that Temur was facing had implications for them all. The Imperial forces had expected the orks to be formidable, but based on how long they were known to have been in the Lepidus system, it didn’t seem possible for them to have ramped up tank production to such a degree. Yet they had. That was the reality of the situation. Krevaan accepted that. There was information that was missing. That bothered him more.

  He took the handset from Akrallas. He was connected to Mulcebar, captain of the Salamanders Fifth Company, on the strike cruiser Verdict of the Anvil. ‘Has there been any change?’ he asked Mulcebar.

  ‘None. All quiet.’

  ‘That won’t last. We are just getting started.’ He was aware that his optimism sounded forced. The plan was ambitious. The Overfiend ork had defiled an Imperial system. The White Scars, the Raven Guard and the Salamanders would do more than crush the invading force: they would use the Overfiend’s own temerity against the warlord. For whatever reason, the Overfiend had committed massive resources to conquering Lepidus. If the beast wanted the system badly enough, the thinking went, important losses might draw it out of Octarius to take personal charge of the invasion. Greenskin psychology was not sophisticated. A good fight, frustrated desire and a point of pride would be enough to call the monster forth from the safety of its stronghold.