will be my support. Commander Grulgor will penetrate the drive cluster and take control of the cylinder's motive power centre. Battle-Captain Garro will neutralise the constract's hatcheries.'

Garro saluted firmly mirroring Grulgor and Typhon's gestures. He held off his disappointment at his assigned target, far down the cylinder from the primarch's attack point, and instead began to consider the first elements of his battle plan.

Mortarion hesitated a moment, and Garro could swear he heard the hint of a smile in the primarch's voice. 'As some of you have deduced, this fight will not be the Death Guard's alone. I have, on the request of Malcador the Sigillite, brought a cadre of investigators from the Divisio Astra Telepathica here, led by the Oblivion Knight Sister Amendera.' The primarch inclined his head and Garro saw the Sister of Silence bow low in return. She gestured in sign language, quick little motions of finger and wrist.

'The honoured Sisters will join us to seek out a psyker trace that has led to this bottle-world.'

Garro stiffened. Psykers? This was the first he had heard of such a threat on the jorgalli ship, and he noted that only Typhon did not seem surprised at such news.

'I trust that the full importance of this endeavour is impressed upon each of you,' continued the Death Lord, his low tones strong. These jorgall repeatedly enter our space in their generation ships, intent on spawning over worlds that belong to the Emperor. They must not be allowed to gain a foothold.' He turned away, his face disappearing into his cloak. 'In time, the Astartes will erase these creatures from humanity's skies, and today will be a step along that path.'

Garro and his battle-brothers saluted once more as Mortarion turned his back on them and moved away towards the welcoming shadows. They did not chorus in a battle cry or mark the moment with raised pronouncements. The primarch had spoken, and his was voice enough.

TWO

Assault Brothers and Sisters Message in a Bottle

THE THRUST OF the heavy assault boat's engines was a hammer to their bones, pressing the Astartes into the acceleration racks. Garro held his muscles tense against the powerful g-forces and let his gaze wander over the interior of the clamshell doors that formed the bow of the boarding ship. Intricate scrollwork spread across the inner face of the doors, charting the countless actions the craft had been involved in.

It was one of hundreds hurtling through the void at this moment, packed with men primed for war, each of them targeted on the jorgall world-ship with the unerring single-mindedness of a guided missile.

Through the pict-circuits laced into the lenses of his armour, Garro rapidly blink-clicked through the data available to him via his command level vox-net. There were feeds from the eye cameras of the squad leaders, quick scripts of telemetry from Voyen's med-icae auspex and there, for a moment, a grainy, low

resolution image from outside across the boat's serrated prow.

Garro dallied on that for a few seconds, watching the motion of the vast cylinder as they approached it. The hull wall of pearlescent metal grew larger. It was so huge that the curvature of it was hardly noticeable, and the only sign that they were actually closing on it was the slow crawl of detail as surface features became clearer: here, a cluster of spikes that might be antennae, there a bulbous turret spitting yellow tracer fire.

The captain felt no fear at the jorgall guns. The assault was moving at punishing speed beneath a cloak of electronic countermeasures, heat-baffle flare bursts and glittering clouds of metal chaff that would render sensors unintelligible. He was confident in Temeter's skills, certain that the captain of the Fourth had sent the picket fleet into disarray and robbed the xenos of any usable warning.

The wall was very close, the distance vanishing in moments. Garro was aware of other boats converging at the edges of the greyed-out image. Long-range sensors had determined that this portion of the cylinder's hull was thin, and so it would be here, some half a kilometre from the cylinder's mid-line, that the Death Guard would make their ingress. Garro let the link fade and gathered himself, switching over to the general vox channel. His voice echoed in the helms of every Astartes on the boat.

'Steel in your bones, brothers. Impact is imminent. I want a clean and fast deployment. I want it so sharp the Emperor himself would applaud its perfection!' He took a breath as the standby alert began to wail. 'Today the primarch leads us, and we will make him proud to do so! For Mortarion and Terra!'

'Mortarion and Terra!' Garro heard Hakur's rough baritone through the chorus of assent.

Decius's voice cut across the channel, brimming with zeal. 'Count the Seven!' he cried, yelling out the company's call to rally. 'Count the Seven!'

Garro joined in, but his words were abruptly shaken out of him as the assault boat's thick bow rammed into the hull of the jorgall cylinder. Piercing shrieks of rendered metal and escaping atmosphere thundered around the boat's thick fuselage as it drove itself deep, clawed tracks across its flanks biting and sparking to pull it through metres of chitinous armour plate. Turning and shifting, the boat's autonomic pilot brain deployed hydraulic barbs to stop the outgassing of air from blowing back into the void.

The juddering, screeching, ear-splitting ride seemed to go on forever then abruptly it stopped. The assault ship listed. Garro heard metal scrape on metal and then the trigger rune before him on the clamshell hatch flashed on. 'Ready on release!' he snapped.

The hatch blew open on explosive bolts and Garro had his bolter loose and in his hands, ready to kill anything that dared to come in, but it was a sudden flood of brackish blue water that smashed down into the boat, not an enemy defender. The liquid was icy, swirling rapidly around his legs and up to his stomach.

'Go!' Garro roared. The battle-captain was aware of his men moving behind him as he launched himself out of the assault craft. He plunged into the cobalt murk and burst back through the surface, turning around, getting his bearings.

It was a hundred-to-one chance. The assault had penetrated through the bottom of a shallow chemical

lake and the dark hulls of the boats protruded from the sluggish liquid like the tips of jagged armoured fingers. Already the waters were icing over and freezing into blue-white halos where the cold kiss of space had followed the invaders in. Through his helmet's breath screen Garro drew a rough inhalation that tasted of metallic salts. Nearby, he saw Grulgor kick angrily away from his lander and snarl out a command.

There on the shore, pointing with his manreaper, was Mortarion. The sight of the primarch was enough to send Garro's blood racing, and he stormed forward through the shallows, his bolter held high. 'Count the Seven!' called the captain, and he did not need to look behind him to see the elements of his company follow in formation.

Garro advanced from the deployment point with Hakur's veteran squad at his side, joined by Decius and Sendek for support. Around them, the chaotic crash of gunfire and blades on blades rippled over the gentle landscape of the lakeshore. Hordes of Astartes met the xenos in deadly, furious conflict.

The alien force was quickly in disarray. Even in non-humans, Garro could sense the motion and shift in the character of a battalion when they lost their nerve. Groups broke apart and reformed, milling and confused, instead of drawing out and away in any semblance of order. Butchering them would not take too much of the Death Guard's energy.

It was clear the jorgalli had understood too late that the objects on a course towards their world-ship were not massive munitions but actually manned craft. The near-suicidal manner of such a boarding operation had shocked them and they were unprepared for the brutal fury of the Death Guard incursion. Their