'It is not our duty to kill innocent people,' pointed out Uriel.

'Our duty is to save as many lives as we can,' countered Barzano. 'If we do nothing and de Valtos succeeds in retrieving the alien ship, many more worlds will die. I do not make this decision lightly, Uriel, but I must rely on cold logic and the Emperor to guide me.'

'I cannot believe this is the Emperor's will.'

'Who are you to judge what the Emperor wants?' snapped Barzano. 'You are a warrior who can see his enemies on the battlefield and smite them with sword and bolter. My enemies are heresy, deviancy and ambition. More insidious foes than you could ever imagine and the weapons I must use are consequently of greater magnitude.'

'You can't do this, Barzano,' said Uriel. 'My men have fought and bled for this world, I will not give up on it.'

'It is not a question of giving up, Uriel,' explained Barzano. 'It is a question of prevention. We do not know where de Valtos is or how he intends to find the ship and without that information we can do nothing. If we hesitate and are too late to prevent him gaining possession of the Nightbringer, how many more lives will be lost? Ten billion? A thousand billion? More?'

'Surely there is something we can try to stop de Valtos?' asked Shonai. 'There are millions of people on Pavonis. I will not just stand by and hear the fate of my world discussed as though its destruction were a matter of no import.'

Barzano turned to face Shonai and said, 'Believe me, Mykola, I am not some heartless monster and I do not believe the death of even a single world to be of no import. Were there another way, I would gladly choose it. I have never been forced to destroy a world before, and if I could stop de Valtos any other way, I would.'

As Barzano spoke, the words of Gedrik echoed in his head once more.

The Death of Worlds and the Bringer of Darkness await to be born into this galaxy. One will arise or neither, it is in your hands to choose which.

'Do you really mean that, Inquisitor Barzano?' he asked.

'Mean what?' asked Barzano, his tone wary.

'About choosing another way if you could.'

'Yes, I do.'

'Then I believe there is another way,' said Uriel.

Barzano raised a sceptical eyebrow and leaned forwards, resting his arms on the tabletop, careful to avoid jarring his wounded arm. 'And what would that be, Uriel?'

Uriel sensed the criticality of this moment and mustered his thoughts before speaking.

'When I was in the home of de Valtos, and we found the two skeleton warriors in the depths of his house, I noticed the battery packs they were hooked up to had identification markings on them.'

'So?'

'They were marked with the words "Tembra Ridge" - perhaps the governor can shed some light on that,' answered Uriel.

'Tembra Ridge? It's a range of mountains roughly a hundred kilometres north of Brandon Gate. They stretch from the western ocean to the Gresha forest in the east, nearly a thousand kilometres of rocky uplands and scrub forests. It's a mining region: there are hundreds of deep bore mines along its length. Most of the cartels own title to land along Tembra Ridge. The de Valtos cartel have several.'

'If those things were unearthed from one of the mines along Tembra Ridge, is it not likely that the Nightbringer itself lies beneath the ground there too?' pointed out Uriel.

Barzano nodded with a smile. 'Very good, Uriel. Now if we could only pinpoint which one they came from we would truly have something to celebrate.'

Barzano's tone was mildly sarcastic, but Uriel could see he was at least considering the idea that the extermination of Pavonis might not be inevitable. The inquisitor turned to Mykola Shonai.

'How deep do these bore mines go?' he asked,

'It varies,' replied Shonai, 'but the deepest are perhaps ten thousand metres, while others are around three or four thousand. It depends on the seam that is being mined and how deep it's economically viable to continue drilling.'

'Then we find out which of the mines are owned by the de Valtos cartel and bombard them all into oblivion from orbit,' growled Uriel.

'Lortuen?' said Barzano, turning to his aide, who nodded thoughtfully and closed his eyes. His breathing slowed, his eyelids fluttering as he culled facts, figures and statistics from the wealth of information he and his scribes had gathered during their researches.

Uriel watched as the old man's eyes flickered rapidly from side to side as though reading information flashing past on the inside of his eyelids, noticing for the first time the tiny glint of metal behind his ear. The old man had been fitted with cybernetic implants, presumably something similar to those of a lexmechanic or savant servitor.

Without opening his eyes, Perjed spoke in a flat monotone, 'There are four mines along Tembra Ridge owned by the de Valtos cartel. All produce mineral ore to be refined into processed steel for tank chassis and gun barrels, but the northernmost's production level is by far the lowest. I suspect that its shortfall is being covered by over-production in the other facilities, which would account for the higher number of worker accidents reported at the other mines.'

Perjed's head bowed, his breathing slowly returning to normal, and Uriel stared triumphantly at Barzano.

'There,' he said, 'We have the location and can attack without resorting to genocide.'

'I'm afraid that this changes nothing, Captain Ventris,' said Tiberius softly.

'Why not?'

'Even at full yield on our bombardment cannon, the magma bombs will not be able to penetrate that far into the planet's crust.'

'Then we take the fight to the surface once more,' shouted Uriel. 'The Tech-marines tell me that we now have two Thunderhawks operational. I say we launch as soon as we can rearm and break de Valtos out from beneath the planet's surface by hand if need be.'

Uriel stared defiantly at Barzano, waiting to shout down any objections the inquisitor might have.

But Barzano merely nodded.

'Very well, Uriel. We'll try it your way, but if you fail, Pavonis will die. By my hand or that of de Valtos.'

'We will not fail,' assured Uriel. 'We are the Ultramarines.'

SEVENTEEN

Virgil Ortega ducked as another rattling blast of gunfire peppered the wall behind him, showering him with stony fragments. He slid behind the angled rockcrete barricade and ejected the spent drum magazine from the heavy stubber, slotting another one home and racking the slide.

Ortega swung the ponderous weapon back up onto the barricade as another rush of troops came at them, bracing the heavy stock hard into his shoulder and pulling the trigger. A metre long tongue of flame blasted from the perforated barrel and a deafening roaring ripped the air as hundreds of high velocity bullets churned the first wave of attackers to shredded corpses. The vibration of the gun's fire was almost too much for Ortega, his muscles straining to keep the gun steady. With such firepower, it wasn't so much a question of accuracy, but of ammunition capacity: the stubber could empty its magazine in a matter of seconds.

Of the twenty-seven judges he'd pulled from the disaster at the precinct house, eighteen were still alive. Emerging from hidden tunnels beneath the palace that not even the governor knew about, the judges had seized the armoury after a brief but fierce firefight. Surprise had been total and the Imperial armoury, designed to indefinitely withstand attack from the outside, had fallen within an hour.

It took less than that for the rebel forces to muster a counterattack and attempt to force the judges from their new refuge. Buried beneath the palace, the armoury was inaccessible to anything but infantry and, with a vast selection of powerful guns at his disposal, Virgil Ortega was proving to be a particularly troublesome thorn in the rebels' side. Without the enormous stockpiles of heavy weaponry stored in the armoury, this rebellion would be seriously deprived of firepower when the wrath of Imperial retaliation descended upon it.