Cawl declined to answer and pushed the flask inside a holster within his robes, then drew his pistol again. For a moment, Friedisch looked terrified, as though he thought Cawl was going to shoot him to cover up his tech-heresy.

He pointed his gun at Aspertia's corpse.

'We don't want two Hester Aspertia Sigma-Sigmas in the world,' he explained. The serpenta flashed. The flasks burned with actinic light as he ruthlessly shot them all out, dead or alive.

Metal smoke and corpse fumes choked the room.

'Now, we have a chance to survive,' he said. 'We had best seize it.'

Bror lost count of how many cyborgs he had killed. They were the tech thralls and the skitarii of Trisolian, according to their badges. Horus was keeping bark his own legion, throwing inferior Mechanicum troops at the Rout. Bror snarled at the tactic. It was cowardly, no matter how strategically justifiable.

The pack fell back from the magazines towards the embarkation deck, cutting their way directly through the first units sent against them Alter that they took to the narrow ways, denying the Mechanicum's warriors the opportunity to bring their heavier long-ranged weaponry to bear. The Trisolian troops were augmented to the point of inhumanity. The few vulnerable parts of their anatomy were protected by internal and external armour. Their weapons were bizarre but effective, and there were thousands of them.

At close quarters they were no match for the Vlka Fenryka. The six of them kept the distance close, where their chainswords and axes cut metal limbs from bodies as readily as flesh.

'They are metal, but it makes no difference to my chainsword!' said Enrir joyfully, slightly delirious from the pain suppressants and combat enhancers his pharmacopeia pumped into him. His wound no longer troubled him, but he was going to be sore later, thought Bror.

'Do you not think they are behaving a little sluggishly?' said Ragner. He blasted a skitarii in the face with his bolt pistol, spraying a mixture of brain matter and dreuitry out of the back of its head.

'They are being puppeted by their masters, not just these tech thralls, but the skitarii too,' said Bror. 'Direct control.'

'Tchah! That's a poor wyrd,' said Enrir, as he broke the skull of another thrall with his spiked knuckle guard.

'I hear the poor bastards welcome it,' said Bror.

'It makes them lousy warriors,' said Flokr.

'Feeling chatty today, are we?' said Himmlik.

Flokr had said barely three words throughout the whole mission.

'Just because I don't think it worth speaking, it doesn't mean I can't talk,' he said, hollowing out the chest cavity of a skitarii with an upstroke of his sword.