He pounded forward, Audacity and Temerity at each shoulder, the passage­way wide enough for six Space Marines abreast. Shooting again, he turned another traitor to vaporised flesh while bolts from his companions ripped away limbs, opened torsos and pulverised skulls. Closer, he saw that the foe were not all entirely human. A hint of feathers, the suggestion of scales and lumpen features marring pale-skinned faces. Digits with extra joints gripped weapons, tails flicked beneath tunics.

Mutants.

‘Purge the unclean!’ Nem­etus roared, holstering his pistol to draw his sword in the last few paces before contact.

‘Purge!’ his brothers yelled in answer, their words almost lost in the growl of wakened chainswords and bolt detonations.

The two assault squads hit the clump of mutant foes like the teeth of one of their chainswords, not faltering for a heartbeat as they plunged into a bloody mess of swinging blades and point-blank fire. A shotgun boomed next to Nem­etus, his storm shield flaring in response. He drove the shield forward, its impact hurling his attacker into the wall, bones pulverised. Continuing without pause into the gap he had made, he swung his sword at the next, its gleaming edge slicing a woman with snake eyes from gut to throat. Those not lacerated by the chainswords of the Intercessors were trampled underfoot, skulls crushed and bodies pulped by the mass of the warriors charging through them.

‘Let none live,’ snapped the lieutenant. ‘Morta extremis.’

A few survived to turn and run, but not for more than a few paces before a fresh hail of bolt pistol rounds caught them.

‘Secure ahead,’ barked Nem­etus, stopping in his tracks. The following Space Marines parted and slowed, striding with weapons readied to the end of the passageway ahead, suit lamps cutting the darkness. Admonius joined him, head turning left and right as he checked the broken mutant remains for signs of heretic life.

Looking back, Nem­etus watched the second gunship swinging into view, hull sparking with the last few defence turret shots. A jumble of body parts and corpses cooled in the thermal glow of his auto-senses, their lifeblood left as orange patches flung across bulkheads and ceiling.

‘Junction secure,’ voxed Talluin from ahead, sergeant of Temerity.

Fourteen seconds.

Nem­etus activated the long-range vox. ‘Ship command, this is assault command.’ He took a breath, fighting back the rush of battle that had swept through him as he had slain. ‘We are aboard.’

Instigating a full retrieval from the augur archives, Praxa­medes waited while the surveyor servitors did their work, grunting to each other as mechanically activated fingers tapped at the key arrays before them. Blurts of binaric cant broke their mumbling, staccato streams of information understandable only to the adepts of the Machine-God and their brain-neutered creations.