'I cannot win,' said Leman Russ to himself. 'I cannot beat Horus.' The training cage he had commandeered was the size of an arena, with a sandy floor laid over an oval combat deck gridded with micropores to allow the escape of spilt blood, but not the sand. It was big enough for spectacle. Only the lack of seating made it a place to train rather than for theatre. Numbered doors concealed entryways to machine pits where combat servitors waited to be called. A gladiator of mythical Roma would have felt at home there.

There were no spectators or aides, no legionaries to spar with. By his order, Russ had been left alone with the machines and his thoughts.

'I cannot beat Horus,' he repeated to himself, 'but I must try.'

He circled a massive combat drone and smiled grimly with approval at its brutish might. Broad plasteel shoulders presented a fortress wall to the front. Its huge arms had the power to crush the life from a hrossvalur. That much metal looked sluggish, but it was not. An overcharged multi-fuel reactor sufficient to power a Dreadnought clung to the back. The machine's plasteel shell protected high-response fibre muscles and twitch-pistons. Scarring remained on the front from its last outing. The square fingers of its enormous hands were scraped with past violence meted out against its opponents. Buried deep inside was an adapted human brain sculpted for combat and programmed with every art of fighting practised by mankind. It was fast, it was deadly; it was the most powerful of all the combat servitors available in the Imperial Palace.

The machine was used by legionaries newly interred within Dreadnoughts to help adapt old skills to their new bodies. It was an unusual practice, instituted by Dorn for his warriors in the wake of Horus' betrayal. Russ thought it sound. During the Great Crusade, the Legions' Contemptors rarely met their match in xenos machines. Now Dreadnought versus Dreadnought combat was commonplace, it made sense to train for it. The machine's colours, hazard striping painted over the dull orange used on civilian heavy machinery, were all that separated the machine from a weapon of war.

Russ was small before it. Each of the hands could crush his skull. Its feet could grind him flat. He had ordered it brought out as it was the only combat drone capable of giving him a challenge. It could kill him. He had decided to face it where none of his men could see and therefore object. This was his time.

'Activate training programme, maximum aggression,' Russ called out. Hidden machines heard his words and adjusted the programming of the drone. 'Disengage all failsafes. Allow killing strength.'