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Final Deployment – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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I

Norroll was first out, as usual, plummeting from the edge of space.

The Valkyrie fell away rapidly, thirty-eight miles above the planet, as Norroll plunged through the upper atmosphere at speeds high enough to crack the sound barrier. He grinned beneath his rebreather, his carapace armour protecting him from low pressure and murderously cold temperatures as he made his descent, unmarked, towards his objective below. He relished the opportunity – such drops had been uncommon since his departure from his old Aquilon squad two years earlier.

Departure. That was one way to understand it.

‘Norroll, report.’

Transmitted through the clarion vox-net, Tempestor Traxel’s order, delivered in his customarily clipped, stentorian tone, reached Norroll as clearly as if they were seated next to one another.

‘Just lost in thought, sir.’

‘I’d be concerned about that if you could think.’

‘You’ll doubtless be pleased to know that I’ve been reflecting upon my pre-mission reading. Nice and clear up here, boss. Orbital ring’s beautiful, this time of day.’

‘I’m glad you’re enjoying your sightseeing tour.’

‘Thank you, Tempestor.’

‘Now do your job.’

The northern continent’s central plains stretched out beneath him, a dustbowl of dun ochre intermittently broken by broad thickets of tangled, drab olive scrub and crisscrossed by barren red-orange rivers meandering lifelessly across the flatland. The largest of these rivers, the Zholm, was home to some of Rilis’ finest orchards, the culmination of a desperate initiative to renew an environment ravaged by millennia of overmining and rapacious industrial production. Generations of farmers spent their lives attempting to coax life from the planet’s appallingly polluted soil.

As cleverly as the planet’s leaders had packaged it, Norroll was not fooled by the pale attempt at renewal – Rilis was a war world. Every child born, every scrap of ore grubbed from the soil, was earmarked for the Departmento Munitorum; the planet’s restoration took whatever pittance remained.

If the collective illusion of working for some notion of a better future ensured the Rilisians looked forward to their tithe quotas, so be it. Despite his general indifference to such things, Norroll found the concept novel.

‘Status at objective?’ Norroll voxed.

‘Unknown,’ Replendus, the eradicant’s vox-operator and newest member, replied. Norroll hardly knew the Scion at all, save that he had been remanded to First Eradicant for some manner of tech-heresy or other during an operation with his previous squad. Replendus had just replaced Trooper Lo, who had been killed during the cleansing of the Vero Salient. Lo had himself replaced Trooper Ochuthi, who had been killed by a sniper on Antarill. Ochuthi had replaced Actis, cut down six months earlier by blood-mad murder-cultists on Tecerriot.

First Eradicant was hell on vox-operators.

‘Xi-Three-One’s Taurox Prime is transmitting,’ Replendus continued. ‘Strong signal. Encrypted, but zero data.’

‘Lights are on, but nobody’s home.’

At seven miles high, the atmosphere thickened and Norroll began to spin, reducing his headlong terminal velocity to around one hundred and eighty miles per hour. The entirety of the front spread out beneath him – the Zholm River, like fresh blood slowly oozing across a dry and blackened scab, wended across a battlefield six miles deep and nearly twenty miles long. Serried lines of broken trenches and reinforced earthworks scarred the length and breadth of the battleground, separated by the ample swathes of blackened earth, churned and heavily cratered, that delimited no-man’s-land. Thick mustard-yellow clouds of dust blended with billowing plumes of suffocating black smoke to create an impenetrable smog that boiled upwards from directly beneath him, obscuring all detail in his landing zone.

He checked his position relative to Xi-3-1’s Taurox Prime on his slate monitron, the portable data-slate mounted to his armour’s right vambrace. ‘Six point three-five miles above objective,’ Norroll reported into the vox. ‘Winds have blown me a bit westward, so I’ll have to make up the difference on foot.’

Unlike the sophisticated grav-chutes Norroll had employed with the Aquilon squads, his current unit – a pair of suspensor fins mounted on either side of his backpack – allowed for little in terms of steering. Though eradicants were more tactically flexible than either a standard Tempest squad or the Aquilons, such flexibility carried drawbacks of its own.

‘What do you see?’ Traxel asked.

‘Battlefield specs look pretty much as reported from up here, but I have zero visibility on the dropsite due to obscuration from smoke and dust.’ Norroll keyed a rune on his data-slate. ‘I’m deploying Actis.’

‘Throne, Norroll,’ Bissot sighed. ‘Don’t call it that.’

The reconnaissance servo-skull uncoupled from its mount on his backpack. A large augur display was fixed to the skull’s right hemisphere, and its right socket was now a repository for a plan position indicator. Considerably more powerful than a conventional auspex scanner, Actis was connected directly to Norroll’s capacitor unit, feeding power to the variety of sensory apparatus studding its cranium. A snaking network of steel-banded cables slid into a series of sockets in Norroll’s armour, interfacing with his data-slate and his helmet’s visual display.

‘Eight hundred feet,’ Norroll announced. ‘Deploying grav-chute.’ Seven blips arrayed across his optical heads-up display. ‘I’ve got seven marks in the landing zone.’

‘Noted,’ Traxel acknowledged. ‘Neutralise and continue mission. We jump on your mark.’

Dropping silently through the cloud, Norroll primed a frag grenade. Setting it for a five-second fuse, he tossed it towards a cluster of four blips to his left and drew his monoblades.

Actis’ augurs fed data directly into the tactical array in Norroll’s omnishield helm, marking the troopers with outlines of green light. As he plunged through the smoke, Norroll’s descent was unobserved, the faint buzz of his grav-chute obscured by the crackle of armoured vehicles burning nearby, distant volleys of artillery and the panicked shouts from the four troopers when the grenade plunked onto the ground amidst them.

‘Begin jump.’

Even before he landed, he was on them, his right monoblade slicing into the unprotected area between chinstrap and flak collar of one as the left slipped between the base of the skull and first vertebra of another. Withdrawing the blades, Norroll landed in a crouch, using his legs as springs as he redirected the force of his landing, pistoning forward into a third trooper before the first two hit the ground. Norroll eviscerated him, thrusting one blade between the trooper’s belt buckle and flak armour and cutting upwards and sideways with a flick of his wrist, then plunged the second blade through his trachea, just to be certain. Orienting on the four other Guardsmen as he shoulder-rolled over the disembowelled trooper, Norroll came up on one knee, sheathing his right monoblade and drawing his hotshot laspistol.

The grenade exploded, spearing through the remaining four troopers in a squall of fragments. Cut down by shrapnel, the two nearest the blast fell outright, while a third was seriously injured.

Norroll dropped the furthest, least injured of the troopers with four quick shots from his hellpistol. Giving the wounded trooper no time to react, Norroll charged him, opening his throat with a monoblade and ducking aside before the blood had time to spurt from the wound.

Norroll sheathed the blade and drew a locator beacon from one of his belt pouches, then thumbed it active, dropping it next to the man he had just killed. He shot the two troopers who had been injured by the grenade’s blast between the eyes and ran on.

‘Dropsite secured and marked. Moving to objective.’

‘Any chance those were friendlies?’ Durlo asked.

‘We weren’t formally introduced.’

Norroll sprinted into the smoke, using Actis’ augur readings to orient on the objective. Hefting a corpse as he passed, he tossed it atop a barrier of rusting triple-strand razor wire and leapt into the area beyond.

Sensing anti-personnel mines, the servo-skull pinged a warning. Norroll dropped a second locator beacon before zigzagging through the minefield, guided by the overlay in his heads-up display.

‘Minefield at beacon two,’ he reported. ‘Recommend diverting around – it’s too big for Durlo to disable a path through.’

‘Acknowledged.’

Near a bend in the river, Norroll noted structures emerging from the dense haze of dun smog. Cautiously approaching the complex, he found it little more than ruins, its buildings reduced to burned-out shells and debris by artillery fire. Accompanied by the low droning of flies, the foetor of death seeped through his respirator’s filtration system, lingering noxiously in the breathless atmosphere with a reek like rotting fish and faeces. Corpses in their dozens littered the ground, identically uniformed and armoured in Departmento Munitorum-standard flak, so it was impossible to determine whether this had been a battle between two indistinguishable forces or a one-sided massacre. They were bloated and flyblown. Norroll knew from experience that these soldiers had lain there for no less than three days.

The largest building in the complex, perhaps once a grand home or farmstead, had apparently been used as a makeshift headquarters – a company guidon yet leaned by the main door, its banner drooping languidly in the lifeless air. With no traps evident, Norroll took no further time to investigate the area, stepping over the mouldering carcasses of the dead on his way out. Ducking through a breach in the property’s low stone fence, he continued onwards.

At the edge of a quarter-mile-wide swathe of artillery-pitted no-man’s-land beyond the former headquarters and its garrison of corpses, Norroll came upon a series of earthworks. Banked up behind nests of barbed wire, the hastily built emplacements provided cover for the tanks and other armoured vehicles overwatching the area he had just passed through.

Its armour melted like wax by a melta weapon, the turret of a lone Leman Russ protruded above the edge of the embankment, its rusting Punisher gatling cannon still trained on the killing fields below it. Norroll cleared the dirt bulwark, skirting the edge of the fortifications. Corpses surrounded the tank, though Norroll could not determine whether they were crew or attackers. The engine compartment gaped open, what remained of its contents scattered on the ground around it, rifled through and plundered of any useful, or valuable, components.

He checked his wrist-slate, verifying his route across what Actis’ augurs indicated were a series of abandoned trench networks. According to his maps, Xi-3-1’s Taurox Prime was only slightly over two hundred yards away.

‘Just dropped beacon three at the end of no-man’s-land, where the trench network starts. I’ll drop the last when I reach the objective.’

‘Acknowledged.’

Closing the vox-link, Norroll felt the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end. He sprang to his feet and sprinted towards the nearby trench system, diving in head first as the Earthshaker round exploded twenty yards ahead of him. Shaking himself free of displaced dirt, he slithered through the layer of muck coating the trench’s bottom on his belly, crawling through the murk towards a nearby dugout.

Norroll surged into the earthen shelter as a round of follow-on fire struck the edge of the trench network where he had entered, rolling against the near wall to protect himself from the blast. He was in a small dirt-floored bunker, approximately three yards square, its walls reinforced with flakboard. An old iron-framed bunk bed, its mattresses stained with mud and blood, stood along the rear wall, while a small folding desk and chair lay overturned in the corner on the dugout’s far side. Loose wrappers, food tins and lho stubs littered the dirt floor, but the only thing of real value Norroll found inside was cover.

Listening for any additional follow-on fire, Norroll poked his head out of the dugout, sending Actis floating up over the edge of the trench as he reviewed the servo-skull’s readings.

‘What in the hells are they firing at?’ he breathed. The likelihood of his detection, especially under these conditions, was low to the point of absurdity. Stinking mud caked his carapace, recolouring it from the 36th Xian Tigers’ ferric oxide green to dingy Rilisian ochre.

‘First Eradicant, have you been noticed?’

‘Negative,’ Replendus responded. ‘Why?’

‘I just took indirect fire.’

‘That was you? Have you been detected?’

‘Unlikely, which makes me wonder what they were shooting at. Keep your heads down.’

Norroll cut the link. He vaulted free of the trench and continued at a run, listening for any further indication of indirect fire. The recon trooper sprinted between trenches and bypassed pillboxes, laspistol extended as he kept to the cover of burned-out vehicles and other heaps of battlefield detritus. A north-easterly breeze whispered between the trenches, clearing the smoke marginally and improving his visibility through the dust and smog to around ten yards.

Naturally, this meant that the enemy had a better chance of seeing him as well. Setting Actis’ augurs for longer range, he picked up his pace.

Ahead, a trooper peeked over the lip of an embankment. Norroll shot him in the head and leapt the ditch without breaking stride. He dropped into a controlled roll down the opposite side, gaining speed on his descent before throwing himself back into his sprint.

Norroll hugged the ground, picking his way between a pair of dead Chimeras, their armour blasted open by artillery fire. Three corpses lay on and around the back ramps of the infantry transports, uniformed in the standard Departmento Munitorum-issue drab green fatigues and Rilis’ characteristically mustard-coloured flak armour of every dead body he had encountered on the battlefield to this point. Bumper numbers, stencilled on the front and rear of each Chimera, indicated that they belonged to the First Battalion, 212th Rilisian Mechanised Infantry Regiment, though Norroll had no idea which side of the civil war the 212th was on. Clearing each vehicle, he found the crews slumped dead in their seats, their corpses riddled by las-fire. He secured medi-kits and several ration tins from the Chimeras before moving on.

Actis’ readouts indicated that the objective lay nearly thirty yards east of his current position. Use of bio-agents in the area in the recent past had garbled the servo-skull’s ability to identify life signs, so Norroll proceeded cautiously, hunched over as he jogged between available areas of cover.

Fifteen yards closer, and he encountered more corpses in Rilisian green and ochre like the rest. Most were relatively whole, splayed haphazardly over soil recently cratered by artillery fire. He noted at least sixteen of them, though he hazarded that their proximity to the artillery splashes made an accurate count difficult. Their right shoulder pads, like the Chimeras he had just scouted, marked them as belonging to the 212th Mech. Rolling one over, Norroll observed the reddish blotches of livor mortis on his face. Unlike the others, this one had been shot in almost the dead centre of his chest, penetrated through by a high-powered las-bolt. The body was still limp and slightly warm, likely dead for under two hours. The closer he got to his objective, the more the casualties appeared to have been cut down by hotshot las-fire.

As Norroll slipped between the dead, Actis’ augurs scanned the corpse of a nearby Tempestus Scion. Rale, Jovian – Trooper First Class, Tempest Squad Xi-3-1, scrolled across Norroll’s slate monitron, followed by a monotone flatline. Selecting this data, he transmitted it to his squadmates in First Eradicant and received a ping of acknowledgement a few seconds later.

He found Rale’s corpse half buried beneath the bodies of the Rilisian Mech. His armour’s oxide-green carapace and dull steel edging were nearly obscured by the blood of his killers, and his clarion vox-array had been torn free of his back and riddled with las-fire.

The smog parted, and Norroll saw the Taurox Prime’s turret, its dual gatling guns and storm bolter aiming idly in his direction from behind a low earthwork. The armoured transport was still running, the berm sheltering it surrounded by the remains of shredded Guardsmen.

He dropped the fourth locator beacon.

‘First Eradicant, I have eyes on the objective.’

‘Acknowledged,’ Replendus replied. ‘Proceed with caution. We’re entering no-man’s-land.’

Actis located two more Tempestus Scions between the dead 212th troopers and the Taurox. Isardo and Noku. Norroll looked around at what must have been more than two score dead troopers surrounding his fellows and their vehicle.

He had known Isardo since the Scholam Tempestus on Sindral-Gamma. While they had never been as close as Norroll had been to Actis, he remembered Isardo as a faithful and diligent comrade, if never exactly a friend.

Norroll climbed over the earthwork, clearing the area around the Taurox as he approached from the vehicle’s front left. Behind it lay two corpses, both shot neatly between the eyes. The troopers were clad in matt-black carapace armour, Cadian pattern, over black fatigues. He dragged the closest one into the area between the left rear track and the embankment and rifled through the man’s pouches. There was nothing to identify him, though he had ample supplies of grenades and hotshot laspacks to supplement Norroll’s back-mounted capacitors. As Norroll stripped both corpses of anything useful, Actis’ scanners identified two more Scions, Trooper Anche and Tempestor Ezl – and the servo-skull’s augurs indicated the Tempestor yet lived. A blood trail, still fresh, led from the two black-armoured troopers around the Taurox’s rear.

Norroll’s chest tightened – given the carnage surrounding the Taurox, he had no hope to find any of the Scions alive. ‘First Eradicant, Norroll. On objective. Tempestor Ezl is still alive.’

This time Traxel responded directly. ‘Status?’

‘Contact to follow.’

Norroll stepped over the troopers, carefully following the blood trail around the corner, where he found the rear hatch standing open. Inside, Trooper Anche hung limply in the gunner’s cupola, blood pooling beneath her on the deck below. Readying himself, Norroll cleared the far side of the vehicle and sprang around the rear corner of the Taurox, stopping short as he found a hotshot laspistol aimed directly between his eyes.

Tempestor Ezl sat propped up against the Taurox’s rear track unit. Blood flowed from a broad rent in his lower cuirass, staining his olive drab fatigue trousers red-black and soaking into the thirsty ochre dust beneath him. His right hand held his laspistol steadily on Norroll’s face, while his left attempted to hold in his innards.

‘Where in the hells did you come from?’ the Tempestor hissed, instinctively putting up his sidearm when he identified Norroll.

‘Trooper Norroll, Tempestor. First Eradicant.’

‘Traxel’s outfit?’

‘Aye, Tempestor.’

‘That figures.’

Unsure whether he had just been insulted, Norroll voxed his squad. ‘I’ve located Tempestor Ezl, but he’s badly wounded. Daviland, I could really use you here.’

‘Estimate we’ll be there in four minutes,’ Daviland replied.

‘How long?’ Ezl asked.

‘Four minutes, Tempestor.’

‘Thanks. I’ve been off comms for a while.’ He tapped his damaged helm with the side of his laspistol. ‘No vox.’ He held up his right vambrace to display its shattered screen. ‘No slate, either. Blocked a chainsword.’

Multiple pings sounded as Actis’ sensors picked up contacts to the south-east. Still too distant to show up on his heads-up display, Norroll’s slate presented several large blobs of green blips, representing at least three sizeable formations closing on their location. While Actis’ long-range bio-augurs remained fouled, the servo-skull’s movement prognosticators functioned perfectly.

‘Enemy infantry inbound. Estimate at least a platoon, approaching on foot from south-east. Three hundred and fifty yards and moving cautiously, but steadily,’ Norroll called into the vox. ‘First Eradicant, any way to pick up the pace a little bit?’

Norroll raised his laspistol as Bissot rounded the front corner of the Taurox at a dead sprint with Daviland on her heels. The gunner stopped, bracing her hotshot volley gun against the corner of the front fender as she faced south-east into the ochre cloud of dust and smoke.

Daviland passed Bissot and slipped down next to the wounded Tempestor, raising Ezl’s omnishield visor and opening his respirator. The Tempestor’s dark skin was ashen and sheened with sweat, and his bloodshot sclera made the deep brown of his irises seem nearly black. Despite the mauling he had taken, he was fully conscious. Bright red blood dripped down Ezl’s chin and onto his plastron, mingling with the darker blood that leaked steadily from his ruptured abdomen.

To the east, a series of explosions rumbled through the yellow smoke. Norroll checked his wrist-slate. The green blobs on his indicator array shifted position rapidly, breaking into a series of smaller pips spreading out in all directions. Explosive readouts populated the screen at the inbound enemy’s location, where they had apparently stumbled upon a minefield.

Daviland lifted the Tempestor’s chin and ran an oxygen tube up his nose. Ezl never flinched. ‘I’m going to move your hand, Tempestor,’ she said, taking hold of his bloodied left gauntlet.

‘Don’t bother…’ He paused.

‘Daviland, Tempestor.’

‘Daviland,’ Ezl repeated. ‘Don’t bother, Medicae-Adept Daviland. Save your gear for someone who can use it.’

‘Right now, Tempestor, that someone is you,’ Daviland said, trying to pull his hand away.

Ezl resisted, locking his arm in place and keeping his hand pressed vice-tight against his wound. ‘Don’t make me strain much harder, Daviland, or I’ll end up squirting my guts out on you.’ His eyes narrowed as he fixed his gaze on hers. ‘When a Tempestor tells you to save your gear, trooper, it’s not a suggestion.’

Daviland relaxed her grip. ‘Understood.’

Ezl slumped back against the rear track guard with a sigh. ‘Good. Now where in the hells is Traxel?’

‘Here,’ Traxel said, rounding the corner of the Taurox at that moment. ‘And my orders to Daviland were to keep you alive, whether you liked it or not.’

Ezl scoffed through bloodstained teeth. ‘Wouldn’t have a drink for us, would you?’

‘Fresh out, I’m afraid,’ Traxel answered, kneeling next to Daviland. ‘You’ve looked better.’

Ezl’s grim chuckle degenerated into a hacking cough. ‘It’s hard,’ he wheezed, coughing up pinkish phlegm, ‘going out amongst the beautiful people. What are you doing here?’

‘Reinforcing Xi-Three-One.’

Ezl grimaced. ‘Yesterday, I’d have told you to push off.’

Norroll reviewed his wrist-slate. ‘We might want to get Tempestor Ezl into the Taurox,’ he said. ‘Enemy infantry’s closing. Replendus, Durlo, are the guns reloaded yet?’

‘Almost,’ Durlo replied. ‘Clearing a jam.’

Ezl wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his gauntlet. ‘Listen – the situation on Rilis is worse than the initial assessments. These Rilisian traitors are motivated, they’re well trained, and they have a serious axe to grind with this world. The Third Division took down the planetary militia in three days. They’re also almost impossible to distinguish from the loyal Rilisians, so that’s a persistent challenge.’ He winced, swallowing hard, and attempted to clear his throat. ‘The biggest problem is the Stygians. Elite infantry. Last time they attacked as a unit, they killed the senate, then eliminated the enforcers in their own precinct house. Since then, we’ve only seen them supplementing the traitors’ infantry squads…’ He trailed off, his breathing shallow.

‘What assets do we have?’ Traxel asked.

Ezl coughed hard again. ‘Two loyal Rilisian regiments, pieced together after the traitors struck. One’s here in the Zholm with the handful of Militarum forces from off-world who answered the distress call, just as we did. No coordination. Different units using different vox encryption.’

‘So, they can’t talk.’

‘Won’t. They can communicate in the clear just fine, but the enemy’s listening. Beats them back every time they try to put something together.’ Ezl’s eyes closed slowly as his head sagged forward.

Daviland rolled his head to the side and injected a dose of stimm into his neck.

The Tempestor jolted awake, his eyes flaring angrily. ‘I thought I told you–’

‘You can’t tell us what we need to know if you’re dead, Tempestor,’ Daviland said.

Ezl nodded weakly. ‘Fair.’

‘Where is the other regiment?’ Traxel asked.

Ezl worked his slack lips back to life. ‘Other regiment’s back east, towards the capital,’ he said. ‘They were trying to dislodge an enemy strongpoint in the mountains, open it up for ground movement, since the enemy controls the skies – not that there’s anything flying any more. Nobody’s heard from them in months.’

His eyes rolled up as his head fell backwards, his helmet banging against the track guard. He began to spasm, his body struck by a spate of sudden convulsions as he vomited dark blood all over himself.

‘Help me hold him steady, Tempestor!’ Daviland urged. The two Scions strained against the seizures, desperately trying to hold Ezl still as Daviland struggled to clear the bloody ejecta from his mouth. She readied a syringe, wrestling to keep the afflicted Tempestor steady enough to administer the compound.

Ezl went slack, hissing out a long breath. His spasmodic twitching subsided as quickly as it had struck. Daviland pressed the syringe into Ezl’s artery.

Without warning, Ezl snatched Daviland’s wrist with his blood-soaked left hand. Twisting her arm away, he fixed her with a fierce glare. ‘How much of that are you planning to waste on me?’ he snarled, before coughing a stream of red-brown bile from his mouth.

Traxel waved Daviland off.

Ezl nodded his thanks. ‘I split the squad. Kept half of us with the Taurox, shoring up a weak point in the Imperial line here. The other half went south, under Commissar Fennech.’ He spat, at the same time trying unsuccessfully to push his intestines back in through the gash in his belly. ‘Resistance was heavy, but enemy capabilities in the area were light. Seemed like a good idea at the time.’

Traxel visibly tensed at the mention of the commissar’s name. ‘Where is Fennech now?’ he asked.

‘Continuing his assessments.’ Ezl shrugged weakly. ‘Almost half of my Scions survived eradicant detail before they came to me, so those are the ones I sent with him. With you already deployed when he got to Sindral-Beta, and Second and Third Eradicants destroyed, it seems he decided my squad was the next best option.’

‘My sympathies.’

‘As to where he is…’ Ezl spat a wad of bloody phlegm into the dust. ‘No idea. Too far out of range for slates or intra-squad vox. We lost clarion when Rale died. We were on our way to link up with Fennech and the others when the artillery started falling. We buttoned up behind an earthwork, hoping to ride it out. Mad bastards assaulted us through the barrage!’

He slumped back limply, breath wheezing out between his lips.

‘Twenty yards!’ Norroll shouted.

Traxel rose, chainsword revving as he adjusted the throttle.

Ezl fixed Traxel with his feverish gaze. ‘Find the loyalists and you’ll find my squad. Find them, though, and you find Fennech.’

‘Tempestor Ezl,’ Daviland said, withdrawing her reductor pistol from its holster, ‘do you desire the Emperor’s Peace?’

Exhaling, the wounded Tempestor seemed to deflate. With eager eyes and a wan smile, Ezl nodded weakly. ‘Now you can use your kit on me, Daviland.’ He looked up at Traxel. ‘Been an honour,’ he said.

‘Emperor light your way, Tempestor,’ Traxel replied. ‘The honour’s been mine.’

Daviland removed Ezl’s helmet and pressed the reductor pistol to the Tempestor’s left temple.

‘If you’re lucky,’ Ezl wheezed, ‘Fennech’s already dead.’

Daviland fired, driving a heavy-gauge piston through Tempestor Ezl’s skull with enough force to liquify his brain, killing him instantly.

‘I’ve never been that lucky.’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2025.
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Cover illustration by Dan Watson.

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-775-7

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* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

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