The fighting was ahead of him, the lee of the tower quiet. No drop pod or gunship could land close by it, and no foes remained to pour from the bastion’s armoured gates. The sun was on the other side of building, and the shadow it cast coincided with this minor dominion of calm. As soon as Justinian and Aldred were out into the full weak light of 108/Beta-Kalapus-9.2, the battle seemed to notice them and gather them enthusiastically to itself.

Drop pods filled the space behind the wall, doors blowing open with violent shouts and allowing out their cargoes of power-armoured angels. Several pods had been hit close to the ground, and listed, blazing, hazing the air with thick towers of black smoke. More numerous were the shattered wrecks of traitor fighting vehicles. What had been a wide-open killing space had become a tightly packed maze of broken armour. Within it, age-old foes hunted one another, intent on hatreds born at the dawn of the Imperium.

Loosing off tightly controlled shots, Justinian strode into the broil of war. The traitors had become fragmented. Many were trapped on the wall tens of metres above. There they made their last stand, assailed by Space Marines coming at them from the towers either side and by the greater forces arrayed outside the walls. Others were falling back firing, using their armoured vehicles to cover their retreat back to their fortress. Their great castle of steel loomed in the near distance, more brutal and over decorated than the wall towers.

‘Where is Bjarni?’ asked Justinian.

‘We will never find him in this,’ said Aldred.

‘Then we shall count those we kill and shame the wolf brother when we return to the Rudense.’

‘Rusticus,’ said Aldred, pointing to the sky. The other squad’s three members hurtled down from above, disappearing into the cauldron of battle.

‘More rivals for the battle tally, as our Fenrisian friend would have it,’ said Justinian.

‘You spend too much time with him. Warfare should be more considered.’

‘You sound like Rusticus.’ Justinian and Aldred were so massive in their heavy drop armour that they had no chance of stealth, and so they pounded through the tangled wrecks relying on speed to shield them.

‘Rusticus speaks sense,’ said Aldred. ‘But I concede Bjarni’s manner of war can be entertaining.’

They rounded the canted hulk of a heavy drop pod, its paint scorched to bare metal and the lower thruster assembly pushed up into the passenger compartment by force of impact. The main stanchions were rumpled with spent forces, and the lower parts of the jammed door buckled like card. A precise cluster of las burns had drilled the side. Fire roared from the top, and a whiff of cooking flesh penetrated Justinian’s breathing filters. The maze thinned out here and the field opened up again. Only a few wrecked tanks, all blazing ferociously, stood between them and the foe.