A red marker blinked into being on his cartograph. Reinforcements moved slowly towards a companionway gallery overlooking the cavern. Chanting the doleful, single digit of death, 'Zero, zero, zero, zero,' a coven of myrmidon destructors moved in to attack.

They were massive things, belligerent grotesques humming with power, fanatic technicae who had given their bodies entirely over to augmentation. The thallaxii they came to support had the uniformity of manufactorum produced units, and appeared inhuman. Not so the myrmidons.

The myrmidons were architects of their own enhancement, and so they were blessed with the potency the Machine-God provides to he who works his own will upon his own form. Little more of flesh remained to them than it did to the thallaxii, but they appeared more human for their ugliness. On one a polished skull, most likely the warrior's original, jutted out on a steel cable neck from beneath hunched shoulders. His arms bore matched plasma cannons. Eyes of red glass swept the battlefield with the thin lines of ranging lasers. From the front of another dangled a pair of flesh-and-blood arms, incongruously wired into a metal breastplate. All of them wore robes, though they did not need them. They were the priests of the Machine-God as destroyer, horrific and potent with the Motive Force in reward for their devotion.

Their stride was as measured, slowed to a reverential pace by the burden of their inbuilt reactors and enormous weapons. Their heads swayed with their ponderous motion. The Sicaran noticed them, and its turret rotated to bring its twin weapons to bear.

Double pulses of lascannon fire tore up towards the companionway, catching it from beneath. Gobbets of metal sprayed upwards. One of the myrmidons was caught full in the chest, rocked back by the explosive reaction of cohesive light contacting matter.

The others repaid the favour.

Cawl's ears vibrated painfully to the building thrum of a conversion beamer powering to fire. A cumbersome, complex weapon to operate, in the hands of the myrmidon lord who bore it, it reached its full, deadly potential. Only one such as he had the internal space to mount dampers required to stabilise the weapon correctly, the cranial implants to calculate the precise focal point for the beam reaction, the internal reactor to feed its massive hunger for power. Light gathered in the weapon's exhaust vents.

'Omnissiah exultant!' the myrmidon blared through multiple vox-emitters. A blinding shaft of energy burst from the weapon's blunt end, and slammed into the Sicaran's turret. This did not cause the damage.

At a conversion beamer's focal point, matter underwent an instantaneous conversion to energy. It was this that ripped away the turret with the force of a minor fusion reactor going critical.

The detonation was deafening. Cawl managed to pull himself back behind his cover just in time to avoid being blinded by the accompanying after-flash and immolated by the fire of freed atoms.