Casting a glance over his shoulder, Vessig motioned his squad forward with a sharp jab of his hand. Troopers Palno and Dundas jogged past him, lasguns held low, ready to fire in an instant.

He watched as they took up positions within the cover provided by the broken rubble and sheet iron of the manufactory. In the smoke and under the shadowy pall cast by the pollution-clogged sky, the Guardsmen melded into their surroundings, their dirt smeared urban camo gear doing its job perfectly. Any enemy approaching their position would be unaware of their presence until too late.

With Saul on point and the others keeping a regimented five metres between them and the man in front, smoothly, and making as little noise as possible, the squad exited the machine temple entering the warren of alleyways and access roads of the District XII complex.

They were advancing along what had once been a ferrocreted roadway running between the factories, although it was now little more than a rutted and pitted mess of broken rubble, scorched road surface and shell-churned mud. Twisted beams that had once formed the metal skeletons of the manufactory buildings lay strewn across the accessway so that Sergeant Vessig and his men had to clamber over girders and through the spaces between broken beams, like negotiating the web of some mechanical arachnid.

Progress was made slower by the network of metal mesh because at irregular intervals the fallen girders obscured the Guardsmen's view of the way ahead as much as the rolling smoke and chemical smog. The men had to take turns to cover one another as they scouted their way cautiously forward.

They were alone out here, as far as Vessig knew. Long-range vox was down and they had lost contact with Squad Servius. They did not know whether Guard HQ had been overrun or destroyed by the enemy barrages. And until Sergeant Vessig and his troopers found out one way or another for sure, they would continue with their primary objective: to harry the enemy and prevent them from gaining any more ground in this district of Ferroturitus Prime.

For this was what it was to be a Guardsman of the Cadian 108th. In fact this was what it was to be a Cadian, and it was this stoical attitude that had earned them such a reputation within the Imperial Guard, for unrelenting bravery and honourable action in the face of overwhelming odds. In a galaxy-spanning army that numbered in the billions, the name they bore was synonymous with the best.

So the squad continued, for all Vessig knew, the only ones still alive out in the ruins. If it hadn't been for the distant pounding of the artillery behind Imperial lines the Cadian sergeant could have easily believed that they were the only loyalists still alive on the whole cultist-overrun planet.

The io8th had been called in following disturbing developments on the forge world. Normally the population of Fornax Orbis Majoris - indentured workers, tech-adepts and mindless servitors - was busily employed producing the weapons with which the armies of half a dozen systems were supplied.