The autocannon turret opened fire again, but its shells whistled harmlessly over the pack. Though its machine-spirit lived, the mechanisms that drove it were fused solid by Enrir's shot. Ragner put a bolt precisely into its augur lenses, blinding it. He advanced, bolt-gun up. The turret attempted to turn but could not, and voided its magazines uselessly into the armoured baffles.

'I'd run now,' Ragner said to his brothers, and sprinted for the magazine door.

The turrets guarding other silo entrances opened fire on the pack as they dashed across the bridge. Ragner was hit, but the round skidded off the curves of his plate, eliciting little more than an oath from the wolf. Bror attempted to help Enrir to his feet, but the warrior waved him away and got up himself. They made it to the entrance of the magazine, hurling themselves into the cover of the silo's vestibule with a series of crashing impacts. A thick blast door barred the way.

'Burn it through!' Bror shouted over the booming of a dozen autocannons.

Himmlik pulled a melta charge from his cloth satchel and slammed it onto the door. Seconds later, the way was open.

Bror stepped through the steaming breach into the shell store.

A floor level with the upper deck of the bridge divided it into two storeys, and through the grille of the deck panels he could see automated mechanisms at work loading the shells onto their transit sleds.

The shells, each the height of a legionary, were stored in dozens of tall hoppers that fed downwards into the sled bays. A high rail coming in from the far side allowed the hoppers to be refilled, but the aperture that it entered through was currently sealed. The shells clunked down with loud, decisive noises, selected from the stacks to some machine optimised pattern that looked random to Bror's eyes. The walls were a delicate lime-green made lurid by counterseptic ultraviolet lumens.

All this Bror had expected to see. What he didn't expect were the organic threads linking the control panels across the narrow ways between hoppers. They clogged the space with a stringy web, their roots buried deep in the machinery of the magazine. Where they touched the metal, slabs of rippled flesh coated parts of the walls, dripping with clear slime.

Gren came through after him, and stopped.

'What have they done to the machines?'

Bror drew his combat knife and probed the sinews. They quivered. When he cut through one, it bled. 'It's… it's flesh,' he said.

'The traitors tamper with the evils of the Underverse,' growled Himmlik.

'You are a gothi now, my brother?' said Gren, but his challenge was voiced uneasily.

'Don't touch it,' said Enrir.

'Good advice,' said Bror. 'Plant the charges, then leave this place.'