‘This is Captain Aeschelus of the Ithraca’s Vengeance. We have been presented with an opportunity to strike–’

The doors grumbled closed behind the lieutenant. He stood for several seconds trying to order his thoughts. It was hard to shake the final image of the astropathic message, the face of death itself looming over the doomed psykers.

Necrons.

Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

Aeschelus stood in his arming chamber performing the mental rituals that accompanied the ceremonial donning of his armour. While tech-adepts and servitors busied themselves around him the captain repeated the litanies of the Ultramarines, lips moving soundlessly in time to the words in his mind. Ratchet-drives and bonding drills whined and crunched as plate after plate of armour was attached to the under-harness. With each piece of curved plasteel and ceramite he also layered on a shield within his psyche, unlocking the processes of the ­psychodoctrination he had undergone during training and enhancement.

The small shipboard chamber was different from the arsenal hall where he had first worn his Primaris armour, but every step – both physical and mental – was replicated exactly. The oily unguents the tech-priests daubed onto the joints of his suit smelled the same, the binaric clicking of prayers to the Machine-God intoned to the same rhythm as the canticles of hate that flowed through Aeschelus’ thoughts.

Piece by piece they assembled him, and piece by piece he assumed the full mantle of the Space Marine commander.

He felt a cold touch of nerve-induction connections fitting into the outlets of his black carapace, synching with the subdermal interface that had completed his transition to post-human warrior. His senses and nervous system interlocked with the artificial muscles and auspex arrays of the battle harness. Inhuman organs grown within him responded to elective stimulus, his third lung and secondary heart picking up on the monitoring systems of the powered armour.

Incense burners left pungent-scented ruddy clouds around the captain. The drifting haze of ceremonial fumes reminded him of the psychic fog that had concluded the astropath’s vision-sharing.

His armour did not stop at his skin but was buried deep in his soul. He did not fear the battle to come; he desired it. It was not simply the frustrations of the preceding years that had fuelled his thirst for victory, it was encoded into his being from the moment he had begun the accelerated command induction. He needed to lead and to know victory. All else seemed a hollow substitution.

Aeschelus had heard the doubts hovering behind the affirmatives of Praxa­medes and the eagerness clearly expressed by Nem­etus. He did not blame the former for his reticence and could not indulge the latter in his potential for rashness. Neither understood the reality of being the sole authority for the ship and every individual on board. And more than that, neither had been imbued with the overriding imperative to push forward the boundaries of war, to become the incarnation of the crusade ethos.