The Iron Hands released their restraints ready to leap out of the Thunderhawk the instant it touched down.

Before they entered the battle for the ordinatus, their Iron-Father had one last battle-cant to inspire them.

'Warriors of iron, onward and upward!'

The black hull of the Thunderhawk rose into the air, kicking up great clouds of dust and ash, spitting auto-cannon rounds into the closest ranks of traitor Guardsmen, providing the disembarked Iron Hands with covering fire as they secured the drop zone.

There was an explosion in the air that shook the ruins on the ground and threw some of the Space Marines to the ground. It would be madness for the Iron Eagle to risk its own survival to ensure the safety of the troops on the ground. With a scream of jet engines the Thunderhawk rocketed away from the imperilled ordinatus.

Weapons-fire snickered out of the smoke and swirling dust, beams of dazzling light streaking out of the gloom and darkness beneath the broiling black clouds of the promethium fires, a vile smog so thick that it turned day to night.

With a terrible roar, autocannon shells began to eat up the ground between the Iron Hands and the enemy. Huge shapes sporting auto-loader hoppers and whirling chain-blades the size of dozer blades clumped towards the Space Marines out of the blackness, supported by armoured warriors as large and imposing as the Iron Hands. The drop zone had already been compromised.

To the Iron Hands' right, and apparently leading towards the overrun ordinatus, was a series of rat-runs that must once have formed part of the mine workings here in the ore-rich foothills of the Argentum mountain range.

The Iron-Father clambered into the trench. Behind him, his servitor bodyguard did the same. Squad Erastus also dropped into the trench, even as Brother Zorian's shoulder was clipped by a spinning piece of shrapnel, which gouged a chunk from the Vurgaan lightning-strike symbol proudly displayed there.

Gdolkin saw Librarian Melchor's squad make for the dark zigzagging scar of another trench on the southern side of the no-man's-land, Apothecary Caduceus's armour shone incongruously white amidst the black carapaces of the other Iron Hands, through his silvered left hand still marked him out as one of them. They were given covering fire by Squad Vincien.

The Ordinatus Gehenna lay to the west of their current position. Gdolkin had briefed his men thoroughly beforehand: their mission was to secure the ordinatus weapon from the enemy with the ultimate intention of finding the errant Magos Thule.

The Iron Hands moved off. Their armoured boots splashed through a muddy soup of polluted water, spilled blood and chemical discharge. The corrugated sheet shored trench was already choked with the bodies of the dead. Corpses in Imperial Guard uniforms lay in messy, broken heaps and here and there could be seen the sigil-cut bodies of heretic turncoat soldiers. The watery gut of the trench was awash with unidentifiable body parts.

There was a shrill whistling, the crump of an impact and then a cascade of foetid earth and rock was thrown into the air above the ridge of the trench, as part of the trench wall collapsed. Brothers Taudis and Naltech extricated themselves from premature burial and then the Iron Hands were on their way again, their painstakingly maintained power armour lending speed and strength to their jogging strides.