The Iron-Father railed against the impotency of his attack: that something so small should prove so resistant to his attacks!

Over the furious buzzing flies Gdolkin heard the whomph and hungry roar of a flamer firing. Brother Fundare had brought his weapon to bear. The Iron-Father began to see a corposant glow behind the black screen in front of his visor. He swept a gauntlet across his faceplate, crushing flies under his indelicate touch, smearing the disgusting sacs of their bristling bodies across his helmet.

The remains of the flies' host was burning furiously in the middle of the trench. At the death of their host whatever enchantment kept the insects attacking the Iron Hands was broken and the swarm dissipated into the air around them.

And then Squad Erastus and Iron-Father Gdolkin were through the line of Death Guard. Their assault on the Plague Marines' position had effectively driven a wedge through the heretic hordes on this front.

Gdolkin allowed himself a moment's exultant satisfaction: the steadfast might of the Sons of Ferrus Manus had overcome the corrupted Chaos Marines.

The great ordinatus engine rose up before them again, only now it seemed a more achievable objective.

The wall at an angled junction ahead of them had collapsed into the defile, creating a slope of spoil and earth leading up out of the labyrinthine network of trenches. Then the Iron-Father saw a shape looming up over the crest of the trench, between the Iron Hands and the ordinatus, that made their struggle so far seem like nothing more than a combat training session.

The monstrosity rose up before Iron-Father Gdolkin and his battle-brethren like some obscene amalgam of machine and unholy warp entity, a crab-like creature in form, all pistoning claw-limbs, studded with snagging barbs and cruel spikes. Mounted upon this clanking undercarriage was a baroquely forged gun-turret tank-body in which was contained the malevolent entity whose presence leaked from the rusted war engine like acid, tainting the very air around it with vileness. The main gargoyle-mouthed cannon of the monstrous construct was ably supported by the reaping gun of an autocannon of archaic design. A robotic arm flexed and stretched like living steel, culminating in a mass of mechadendrite tentacles, writhing with an unnatural life of their own.

Above the thorax portion of this oil- and slime-dripping creation of Chaos, a daemonic visage, formed of rust-discoloured steel, stared down on the Space Marines, as if they were nothing more than insects, baleful witch-fires burning behind its eye-slits. A ragged plague standard fluttered in the steady wind blowing over the battlefield above the trench line bearing the unmistakable insignia of the Plague God and the name of the blasphemy: Ebolus. It stung Gdolkin's remaining biological eye to look upon it and he could see glyphs of the Lord of Decay forming in the rusty scars covering the metal of the machine. Each joint was emblazoned with the eight-pointed star of the Fell Powers.

Gdolkin shivered involuntarily. The whole horrific fusion of machine and Chaos-spawned daemon drew a toxic miasma of noxious fumes with it, more polluting than the industry-ruined atmosphere of Fornax Orbis Majoris. It clung to the construct like a second skin, and made the air feel greasy. Sooty exhaust turrets coughed yet more foulness into the air from the impossible engine, pounding its pistons inside the machine beast like the beating of some daemonic metal heart.