The lighters’ bulky forms settled like large, lumbering birds on the vast rockcrete plain of Starport. It would take days for the regiment’s full cargo and support staff to unload, but the fighting strength of the 101st was sent straight up to the camp to acclimatise and start training.

Once they were under way, Minka ran through the basics. Grav­ity. Daylight hours. Hostile life forms. Diseases. Having covered the pertinent details, she said, ‘It’s pretty normal. And of course, there’s an intractable siege that we’re here to sort out.’

They had not yet seen Crannog Mons, so it was all theoretical to them. But they were weary of confinement aboard ship and were just glad to be planetside. They opened up the top hatch, climbed onto the Chimera and stretched out.

It wasn’t long before the stench of smoke and old decay surrounded them. Their humour quickly faded as they left the radar masts, control towers and flat rockcrete slabs of Starport and got their first true sight of the planet of Malouri.

The land was white. Baine picked up the auspex and checked it out. ‘Bone fields,’ he said. He passed the auspex around. It was a bleak sight. War had crossed over the planet like wildfire, with hundreds of thousands dying in the opening skirmishes. There were mountains of bones and excavation teams were busy bulldozing them into mass graves.

An hour or so later, they saw jagged mountains rising from the ravaged landscape.

‘They seem familiar,’ Baine said.

They looked, not quite able to determine what was strange about the terrain before them.

At last, Orugi said, ‘They’re battleships!’

Minka suddenly understood. The land about was strewn with fragments of warp-craft that had fallen to the planet, their tower­ing metal wrecks forming ranges of burnt and blistered armaplas and steel.

The exoskeleton of an Imperial battleship lay across the road close by, its vast bulk stretching away for miles in either direction. Its spine had fractured upon its fall, forming a road that cut through the ship’s centre. The interior of the craft rose up on either side, a rusting canyon, hung with tendons of pipe and ducting. The darkness was occasionally lit by the flash of arc-lights as Adeptus Mechanicus recovery crews slowly cleared the most salvageable parts of the wrecks.

It took ten minutes to pass through the void-ship’s innards. The mountains of fuselage soon began to diminish, and before them lay a vast flat plain, acne-pitted with craters, each one silvered with putrid floodwater. As far as the eye could see, reflected light silhouetted barricades of knotted razor wire and tank traps, and the hulks of destroyed tanks, transports and carriers. There was no life, except for swirling flocks of black carrion birds. Nothing to offer variety except for the sight of a crashed Marauder or the rusting hull of a burnt-out Leman Russ.