Even the debased bolters and war knives carried by the Death Guard were oxidised and dripping with disgusting toxins.

The legends said that these daemons of death had once been counted among the finest of the God-Emperor's crusading Space Marines, although to look at these living embodiments of plague and pestilence such an idea seemed madness to Vessig. But one thousand lifetimes ago they had broken their oaths and betrayed Him on Earth, turning on the very empire they had helped to build, now only desiring to tear down its towering walls and mighty bastions.

The world that had made the Death Guard warriors of the Emperor was long gone. Now, the possessed daemon-world that had become their festering home, and from which they had come to join the Despoiler's perversion of a holy war, was said to be a planet formed in the very likeness of the Plague God's own decayed dimension: a bubbling cesspit, boiling with malignant disease, the birthplace of viruses and terrible plagues.

To Vessig it seemed that these Traitor Marines could only have been vomited forth from the very deepest midden of hell itself, so vile and polluted was every fibre of their being. That anything so sick and corrupted could still be alive was beyond reason.

The sergeant's feeling of nausea only increased as the plague-creatures advanced. He tried to aim his lasgun, blinking away the salty tears streaming from his eyes. He felt his stomach turn over again and tightened his grip on the trigger as a clenching spasm wracked his body.

He had been aiming for the third traitor's head. Instead his las-bolt entered a hole in its armour, through which Vessig was horrified to see pulsating purple-grey intestines. The las-bolt sizzled wetly and the Death Guard continued its inexorable advance.

Horribly almost as terrible as the appearance of these servants of the Plague Lord and the air of sickness they carried with them, the Cadians' attacks seemed to be having no effect.

The first of the Death Guard raised its rusted bolt-gun and fired. A burst of corroded shells tore through the air in a roar of gunfire and Ranpol, who was standing right next to Vessig, exploded, splattering the sergeant with steaming blood and gobbets of sizzling flesh.

'Back!' Vessig gasped. 'Back into the barn!'

Vessig and Dundas staggered back into the hangar. The sergeant could hear Dundas coughing wetly through the vomit clogging his rebreather.

The two men threw themselves behind a lifting gantry as the Death Guard burst into the barn at a clumping run. Hearing the commotion at the door the other Guardsmen reacted instantaneously. The whizzing crack of las-fire joined the chugging cough of bolter shells tearing through the air and the spang

noise of those shells impacting against the hulls of wrecked tank chassises.

The interior of die manufactory lit up with the strobing of weapons-fire.

Vessig felt a stinging burn on the skin of his upper left arm as a piece of hot shrapnel tore open his combat fatigues and the bicep beneath. He staggered back from his position beside a crane gantry at the shock of the impact. Irving, firing from the same sheltered position, turned to see what had happened. Vessig watched in horror as Irving's head exploded like a shot melon, as a bolter shell punctured the toughened material of the Guardsman's helmet.