In the wake of the sudden, disastrous, order-toppling uprising, forces had been called in to help the remaining beleaguered PDF units quell the uprising. Sector command had to ensure that Fornax did not fall to the forces of Chaos, and then had to try to reestablish the supply chains of vehicles and weaponry being shipped from the forge world to the frontline warzones - of which Fornax Orbis Majoris had now become a part - as quickly as possible.

That was why the Wyverns had found their troop transport redirected at the command of the master magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus from its passage from Kaynar VI to Celestino in the Veritas system. Their transport ran the gauntlet of the Chaos ships still in orbit over Fornax, then, escorted by two frigates of the Navis Nobilite, the dropships of the 108th had descended on the northern continent of Fornax inside one of the protected industrialised areas still under loyalist Imperial control, along with the Tradaran Rifles and the Joparin 24th Cavalry.

Within the day the Cadians had been deployed south-west into one of the most toughly contested planetary sectors, to assist the Imperial forces trying to hold back the enemy forces laying siege to the manufactory complex two hundred kilometres square, designated Ferroturitus Prime by the Adeptus Mechanicus forge-masters.

So it was that Sergeant Vessig found himself and his squad cut off from Imperial Command in the no-man's-land of the levelled tank manufactory with the enemy closing in on their position. And as far as Vessig could tell, the whole sector was going to hell.

There was a skittering noise, like shifting gravel, from somewhere nearby. The fog, along with Vessig's own helmet and rebreather, made it almost impossible for him to tell precisely where the noise had come from. Instinctively he brought his lasgun up to his shoulder ready to take a bead on any emerging target in an instant.

Vessig reminded himself that there were other things out here in the rains, other than the loyalist Guardsmen and the enemy they were stalking. There always were on these Mechanicus worlds, in Vessig's experience, and their presence was even more likely on a world like this, under attack from the forces of Chaos. Rodent scavengers, mutated by the toxins pumped out into the environment by the relentless manufactories. Forgotten, obsolete servitors, their programmes corrupted, carrying out procedures that no longer served any purpose. Strange, mechanical things, robotic drones fashioned from skulls of the faithful dead, with a life of their own, going about their own inscrutable business.

There was the sound again.

At another sign from their sergeant, the squad slipped into cover at the edges of the rubble-strewn roadway.

This particular manufactory had been laid out on a grid system and covered an area, Vessig guessed, of some ten kilometres square. The initial enemy bombardment had flattened much of the factory plant. Here and there fractured archways and splintered

rockcrete columns still stood, rising through the hazy grey fog like trees of the prehistoric forests that had once flourished on this planet. Before them was another of the many right-angled junctions in the service road grid-system. The ferrocrete service-way broke off east and west in front of the rains of another massive cathedral-like structure. The roof was a criss-cross of blackened spars and only one of the two spires remained at all.