The boom of releasing bolts shook the walls. The blast doors at the far end of the chamber pulled wide. A Huscarl with the black cloak and white fur of the Praetorian’s master bodyguard strode into sight, bolter and sword in hand.

‘Rise, brothers,’ said the figure. ‘Rise. Your lord calls you to war.’

‘Cerberus…’ laughed a voice in the warrior’s skull. ‘You are amongst the dead and betrayed again, returned to the hell you fled…’

He saw it all again: the Whisperheads, Xavyer Jubal rising from the floor, red light pouring from his eyes.

‘Samus is the man beside you…’

Abaddon’s blade cutting at him.

‘There was nothing to betray.’

Mersadie Oliton looking up at him, eyes wide but not afraid.

‘I understand you have a story…’

Mersadie… Mersadie…

Loken opened his eyes. There was blood across his sight, and blood dripping from the passage walls. He pulled himself up, feeling sharp edges grating against each other in his chest. Pieces of yellow armour and ragged meat lay in the congealing pool of blood covering the deck. Shadows writhed at the edge of sight.

‘Samus is here…’ the whisper distant, half-real, calling.

Something in the shape of a skinned dog was biting into the open ribcage of one of the Imperial Fists. It turned as Loken stood. Its mouth was a cave of needle teeth. It leaped. Loken met it with the edge of his chainsword. The spinning teeth chewed through the thing’s head and back into its body. It writhed, scrabbling at the air as black ichor sprayed out, but Loken was already surging forwards. He burst through its remains and began to run. In his head the call was rising, the scent in the air, shivering through his senses. He was Cerberus again now, forsaken and betrayed, loyal and inexorable, last hunter of the Luna Wolves, and he would have vengeance.

‘Samus is here…’

‘It’s coming!’ shouted Su-Kassen. Rogal Dorn did not turn. One of the trio of Huscarls spun to fire back down the passage behind them. Su-Kassen kept running.

‘The end and the death, the end and the death, the end and the death…’ sounded across the vox and growled from the ship’s alarm and speaker-horns.

Bolter fire sawed through the dark. The double-layered doors to the bridge slammed back into the walls in front of them. Su-Kassen looked behind her. Half-visible things with starved bodies and wings of rotting feathers tugged a Huscarl from the ground. Claws bit through armour. They lifted him, blood scattering as they peeled armour from flesh. A tide of black mist was pouring down the walls, strobing with red lightning. She could see the shadows of shapes inside the murk, bounding and rolling towards them on legs and tentacles.

She felt her mind flood with images of plains of dust and bone, her throat with the sting of bile.