The ship opened fire with its wing-mounted desolator lascannons. The three-barrelled weapons rotated at blurring speed as they fired, their rapid torque helping offset atmospheric lensing, not that beam dispersion was much of a problem at this range. Banks of meltacannons mounted in the Overlord’s nose opened fire a few seconds later.

Molten holes appeared in the armourglass, and the Overlord burst through the weakened dome, sending molten minerals and shards of metal scattering inward into the gardens.

‘Ready! Now!’ yelled Felix.

‘We march for Macragge!’ roared the Primaris Space Marines.

The gunship thumped down hard, throwing Felix forward in his restraints. The ship rocked back on its landing hydraulics. As it recoiled from the impact, Felix’s harness disengaged and shot back into its housing in the ceiling. Simultaneously, the assault doors blew down with crushing force, flattening whatever was on the other side and admitting a sickly yellow light into the transport bay.

First out were the Primaris Aggressors. They wore battleplate of a similar type to Felix’s, but more massively armoured: the Gravis class. Before they had exited the troop bay, missiles shot from their shoulder-mounted racks, their exhaust filling the craft’s troop compartments.

There were two squads of Aggressors, one for each door. Two squads of Hellblasters followed, the containment chambers on their plasma incinerators glowing bright as they cycled up to fire. Felix and the two Librarians emerged next, along with the temporary company’s Apothecary. After them came four squads of Intercessors, who fanned out, bolt rifles up.

Ardium was a hive world, a designation synonymous with overcrowding and human misery, but this was Ultramar, and the hive worlds in the star-realm of the Ultramarines were kinder than most. Though life was hard and short there, some provision was made for the well-being of their citizens. Ardium had a plethora of domes projecting from its hives, especially on the upper levels, where large-scale bio-habitats recreated those lost from most of the surface. The planet was famed for them, giving the hives there the appearance of gargantuan trees.

A forest surrounded Felix’s ship, but it was not the healthy place it was supposed to be. Yellow fog raced out through the hole in the dome, sucked away by the differential in air density. Flags of it streamed from between blackened branches festooned with slime. At such rare heights, Macragge’s sun shone without the impediment of clouds, but though Nurgle’s work had not yet poisoned the sky, the strength of the sunlight was stymied soon after entering the hole made by the Overlord, its beams becoming split and divided, lost amid the vapours poisoning the hive’s inner atmosphere. Winds blew briskly towards the breach, the fog’s twists forming screaming faces as it was sucked out into Ardium’s upper troposphere.