Calgar boarded the tank to panicked shouts cut short by the bangs of bolt-rounds annihilating flesh. The sound followed him all the way to the main highway, where faster transport waited.

For the first time in a long time, Marneus Calgar felt like a failure.

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

Ardium

A distinct change to the engine’s pitch occurred as they passed into enemy-held territory, and the smooth flight turned choppy. The Overlord’s airframe rattled. Its engines yowled, struggling to process air whose consistency was unnaturally inconstant. A sense of wrongness upset all minds aboard the transport, thickening with every kilometre they flew closer.

‘We approach the heart of darkness,’ said Donas Maxim. Crystal tracks in his psychic hood glowed as they encountered the increased warp activity. Blue luminescence mingled with the transport bay’s dark red combat lights, painting his helm with neon highlights. He was as uncanny as the beasts he was trained to destroy.

‘I think we can all sense it,’ said Captain Felix, looking around at his warriors. They had begun to fidget in the way peculiar to Space Marines, looking to their brothers and checking their equipment over and over again.

‘Not so strongly as I,’ said the Codicier. His words were hard, a shell against the pain. ‘The warp taint is far more powerful than we predicted. We must be careful.’

Maxim was the sole early-pattern Space Marine inside the Overlord’s twinned hulls. Every other was of the Primaris generation. Maxim’s hood and the badges on his ornate blue armour made him bulkier than his own brothers, but every one of the Primaris Space Marines was taller than him, and more powerfully built.

Accompanying Maxim was a single other psychic Space Marine: Gerrundium, a Primaris Lexicanium. The pair of them gave off a calming power, a sense of purpose and confidence that infused the already unshakeable Felix with a resolve as solid as a neutron star, despite the warp taint emanating so powerfully from their target. In contrast, the malevolence around them seemed stronger. Owing to the position of his restraint cage, Felix was athwart the border where the malign and the benign actions of the warp mingled, discomfiting his mind. On the enemy’s side was a dark potency. Upon his skin beneath his armour, it felt like painful static electricity, a crawling of the flesh. It was a call, an urging to action he would rather not take, the kind that afflicts the insane deep into the night and demands something of violence be done – a dark vitality, a turning-in of agency so that it became impotent self-destruction.

‘I can feel it well enough. It pains me,’ said Felix. He wondered at the sensation, logging it for later consideration. He had not felt anything like it before. ‘This is the power that calls the dead from life?’