'Who is in charge here? I want to see him now!’ Iron-Father Gdolkin demanded, his voice resonant with barely-contained anger.

Standing at the top of the stone steps leading down into the command chamber of the bunker complex, Gdolkin scanned the anxious faces of its startled occupants.

The ferrocrete structure that formed the headquarters of Imperial operations was plain and functional compared to the grand design given to the noble veneration of the primarch in the Vurgaan clan's land-leviathan monastery-fortress, and lacked the extravagant gothic detailing of the cathedrals of the machine temples of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

It was all brass-framed cogitator banks, walls of oscilloscope augury displays and at the apex of an amphitheatre section of tiered plasteel benches he could see the concave bowl of a holosphere projector. Currently the image displayed in three-dimensions within its static flickering light-sphere was that of some monstrous Chaos-engine trundling across the oily estuary spilling from a promethium processing plant. The engine, which looked like a great, wheeled war tower, appeared to be covered with some sort of rough tarpaulin or animal hide. Slime dripped from holes in the skin of the tower, leaving a trail of tar-like excretion in the deep grooves left by its wheels.

From this spot the Imperial tacticians and Guard commanders could oversee the Imperial defence of half a dozen districts in the industrial cityscapes of Ferroturitus Prime. The one obvious ornamentation in the command bunker was a huge double-headed eagle, its monstrous, steel-bladed wings outstretched above a widescreen pict-display.

The bunker was alive with the bustle of officers from various rungs of the command ladder, tech-priests, loyalist PDF officers and Administratum scribes. And yet despite all their obvious business, to the Iron-Father's eye, none of them seemed to be achieving very much.

Too many scribes blot the scroll, he thought.

Gdolkin thundered down the steps from the adamantium bulkhead entrance to the bunker, twelve Iron Hands following in his wake, their armour still scorched and scarred, fresh from their battle against the traitor Death Guard in the manufactory. Behind the Space Marines, a huddle of exhausted Guardsmen dressed in the urban camo fatigues of the Cadian 108th shuffled into the command centre.

The Iron Hands' original objective, on Fornax Orbis Majoris, had been to rendezvous with Magos Omega Thule of the Adeptus Mechanicus. But as their Thun-derhawk, the Iron Eagle, had roared in low under the roiling smog swathing the manufactory rains, they had detected the presence of pockets of the Plague God's own putrescent warrior elite.

The sheer existence of such foul abominations, the embodiment of what happened when man gave into the ultimate weakness, made the Space Marines' blood boil. They were a stain on the face of the Imperium, an abhorrence in the eyes of the Emperor and his most unforgiving loyal primarch sons. The Iron Hands could not allow such blasphemies in the sight of the Emperor to continue to exist, and so had bailed out of their craft into the ruinous wasteland where they had then confronted their enemies in a merciless trial by combat.