‘Too slow,’ was all Layak said. Abaddon felt something shift in the air. The taste of burnt sugar formed on his tongue. A high note, like the sound of breaking glass, drawn out to the point of pain. The world stuttered. Layak was moving past Abaddon, his blade slave charging with raised sword. Abaddon saw a fresh curtain of energy unfold into being across their path in the stopped-clock moment. Shadows were spilling from Layak. The blade slave struck the energy field. Light and dark flashed out. Every scrap of shadow became a pool of blinding light, every light a hole into night. The sword screamed as its edge cut. A hole – no, a wound – opened in the energy field, haloed by cold light and sparks. Layak raised his staff as the sword cut, and spoke a word.

Silence screamed in Abaddon’s ears. He tasted jagged iron on his tongue and in his throat. The cut in the energy curtain ripped wider, and beyond it the layers of fields parted. Layak had gone still now. His hand was smoking where it gripped his staff. Blood was running from the bottom edge of his mask.

Abaddon was moving forwards through the opening, gun rising, eyes fixed on the woman at the centre of the room. The devices and vials in her hand were spinning, the fluids inside fusing into dark red. He did not understand the ways of the Selenar, but he did not need to understand their mysteries to know what she was doing. She was Heliosa-78, sole surviving matriarch of the Selenar, and in her hands she was mixing death with which to poison the last remains of all her kind held sacred.

In these halls the gene-seed of the Legions had been multiplied and implanted, and here the means to do that again remained. It was a prize great enough that Horus had sent his most favoured son to secure it – a victory beyond breaking the defences of Luna. Luna would become a birthplace for warriors again, but now their war would not be in distant stars but on the surface of the world that hung in the sky above. But not if he failed.

He saw her half turn to look at him as the curtains of energy split.

Layak was beside him, holding out his staff.

The guardian beast rose from a hole in the floor. Its shape was that of a lion crossed with a scorpion skinned in graphite and oxidised bronze. It bounded into Layak. The priest spun, but the beast was faster. It struck Layak and cannoned him back off his feet. Armour tore, blood scattered across black stone.

Twenty

Samus
Librarius
Will of stone and fire

The Phalanx, Inner System Gulf