The legionaries opposing them wore blue Night Lords or Alpha Legion, Cawl could not tell through the smoke The signal pulse of their ident beacons was corrupted. Imperial codes had been replaced by the identifiers of the enemy. The smoke shrouded everything further than five metres away. Ruptured oxygen pipes quickened fires enough to make them burn steel. The stink of hot metal was overpowering. Cawl's sensors bleeped out a cacophonous din of alarms that stressed the spaces of his mind. Gas. Fire. Bullets. Explosions. So many ways to die, and the coterie of minor machine-spirits bonded to his mind were only too eager to tell him all about them.

His thallaxii advanced, methodically spraying the hall end with their weapons. Energy discharge of myriad sorts provided a colourful display. Phased plasma bursts and over-charged photons competed to see which could blaze brightest. Las-fire sped in short, straight lines; artificial lightning zigged and zagged.

A hexagonal crate of soil exploded. He saw a legionary go down, the gaping hole in its chest-plate lined with the glow of molten ceramite. Another fell, drilled through in three different places by the indigo beams of a multi-laser. Mass-reactives blew all over the frontal casing of one of the thallaxii. It staggered, sinking lower upon its knees. Gas sprayed from a severed tube. Cawl thought it would fall, but it paused as it rerouted function away from damaged components, then it lumbered on, the slight limp it now suffered hindering it not at all.

The legionaries fell back like ghosts. The thallaxii plodded on, weapons swinging on their gimbals as they tracked, locked onto and assessed everything that might pose a threat.

A moment's relative quiet fell. Alarms wailed all over the facility. Decompression winds surged violently and died as breaches in the agri-caverns were made and bulkheads sealed against them. Cawl risked poking his head around the fallen utility column he cowered behind. He gripped his volkite serpenta so tightly his fingers ached. He had not fired a single shot.

An oxygen pipe overhead roared like a flamethrower. Cawl risked accessing the infosphere to hunt out its command protocols and shut it off. He found it. Like an extinguished candle the pipe went out. The wall opposite was blackened for metres around. At least now he felt he had done something useful.

The thallaxii paused ten metres away. Cawl had a minor pict view in his third eye run a text screed eavesdrop on their conversation. Their communications were terse, to the point and exclusively concerned with killing.

Their next course of action agreed, they advanced again. Cawl swallowed. He was assigned as support to them. He would have to follow. He did not want to. He was unaccustomed to the armour he wore. The weight of the servo-harness mounted on his back was supported by suspensors, but the mass upset his gait, and he was forced to move oddly, ridiculously, to keep up with the shock troops.