‘This is a broken force,’ muttered Ba’ken, breaking the silence as he peered out of one of the Rhino’s vision slits.

Dak’ir followed his trooper’s gaze. ‘They are not like the natives of Nocturne, Ba’ken. They are unused to hardship like this.’

A lone file of Stratosan Aircorps passed the convoy, marching in the opposite direction. They trudged like automatons, nursing wounds, hobbling on sticks, lasguns slung loose over their shoulders. Every man wore a respirator, and a tan stormcoat to ward off the chill of the open atmosphere. Only the cities were domed, the sky-bridges open to the elements, though they had high walls and were suspended from rugged-looking towers by thick cables.

The gate of Cirrion loomed at the end of the blasted road. The way into the capital city was huge, all bare black metal, and hermetically sealed to maintain its atmospheric integrity.

‘I heard a group of corpsmen talking before we mustered out,’ offered Ba’ken as they approached the gate. ‘One of them said that Cirrion was how he imagined hell.’

Dak’ir was checking the power load of his plasma pistol before slamming it back into its holster. ‘We were born in hell, Ba’ken… What do we have to fear from a little fire?’

Ba’ken’s booming laughter thundered in the Rhino all the way up to the gate.

Deep within the bowels of Cirrion the shadows were alive with monsters.

Sergeant Rucka fled through shattered streets, his pursuers at his heels. His heart was pounding. Cirrion’s principal power grid had collapsed, leaving failing back-up generators to provide intermittent illumination for the city via its lume-lamps. With every sporadic blackout, the shadows seemed to fill with new threats and fresh enemies. It didn’t help matters.

Rucka had been at the front of the second push in the capital city. The attack had failed utterly. Something else was stalking the darkened corridors of Cirrion, and it had fallen upon his battalion with furious wrath. It was totally unexpected. In strategising his battalion’s assault Rucka had deliberately taken an oblique route, circumventing the main battle zones, to come through the northern sector of the city.

All Stratosan-gathered intelligence had suggested that insurgent resistance would be light. It wasn’t insurgents that had wiped out five hundred men.

Rucka was the last of them, having somehow escaped the carnage, but now the cultists had found him. They were gaining too. His once proud city was in ruins. He didn’t know this dystopian version of it. Where there should have been avenues there were rubble blockades. Where there should be plazas of chrome there were charred pits falling away into stygian darkness. Hell had come here. There was no other word to describe it.

Rounding another corner, Rucka came to an abrupt halt. He was standing at the mouth to a mag-tram station; on one side a stack of industrial warehouses, on the other a high wall and an overpass. The trams themselves littered the way ahead, just burnt out wrecks, daubed in crude slogans. But it was the tunnel itself that caught the sergeant’s attention. Something skittered there in the abject darkness.