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  The Adeptus Astartes frigate Vitriol coasted through the silent void, running alongside the watch fortress at an inertial drift. Below them both, the gas giant Vhospa Mundi turned, swirling with sickly cloud bands and lazy storms. It was an ugly planet, but it served as respite from the brain-aching haze of heliotropic riftspace beyond – for Vhospa Mundi was a fringeworld on the Cadian Gate, bordering the Eye of Terror.

  Like the Semper Vigilare – the border watch fortress whose automated docking clamps and magna-couplings embraced the arriving frigate like a long-lost cousin – the Vitriol was blemished and battle-scarred. It was the practice of the Excoriators Space Marine Chapter. Each boarding impact, each cannon blast and each lance strike was honoured. After the structural damage had been repaired, the battle scars were consecrated and preserved. Annotations were painted onto the hull to commemorate the blemish, identifying the time and place it was incurred. The bastions, warships and personal battle plate of each Excoriators Space Marine bore such shabby remembrance as perpetual reminders of past mistakes; mistakes the Excoriators had no intention of repeating.

  As the billowing clouds parted and the airlock trembled aside to reveal the darkened docking barbican, Squad Whip Torban Deker was surprised to find that the watch fortress commander had not organised a party to meet and admit them. This oversight had not gone unnoticed by Titus Rhaddecai, the Chaplain that Deker and his half-squad were accompanying on board.

  ‘Read back the charges,’ Rhaddecai instructed his seneschal, Phanuel. ‘Squad Whip Deker, you may proceed.’

  ‘Yes, Chaplain,’ Deker acknowledged, leading the way on board the Semper Vigilare with his boltgun. ‘Pattern Tessercarp.’

  With Brothers Ezrapha, Ahaz, Udiah and Damaris forming the four corners of an escort about Rhaddecai and his slate-consulting serf, the Excoriators left the airlock of the Vitriol and entered the watch fortress.

  ‘Corpus-Castellan Abnerath has been censured for the following infractions,’ Phanuel declared. ‘Failure to relay augur array data identifying the exodus-course of the enemy capital ship Terminus Est. Failure to engage the Terminus Est upon system approach. Consequent failure to prevent the destruction of the Quora-Cyriax shipyards by the aforementioned enemy vessel, the Geryon’s World Atrocity and the loss of the White Consuls Strike Cruisers Hermes and Eternal Faith.’

  ‘To those contraventions you may add failure to establish approach acknowledgements,’ Rhaddecai rumbled. ‘Dorn knows, I hate talking to cybernetics. Add also the absence of a receiving party at the entry barbican.’

  ‘Very good, my lord,’ Phanuel said, walking and annotating.

  Deker’s nostrils flared. Exchanging the atmosphere of the Vitriol for that of the watch fortress, the squad whip found the air stale. A fly droned about his ear with zigzag insistence before being driven away with a waft of his gauntlet. As it departed, the Excoriator discovered that he had been left with the drone of static. Loudhailers cracked and crackled with the emptiness of an open channel. Deker rounded a corner in the corridor, his pace brisk, the hydraulic sigh and imperative clink of his plate the emissary of Rhaddecai’s officious scorn.

  As the Excoriator did so he found a battle-brother in the lonely passage beyond. The Adeptus Astartes was dressed in full plate, bar his battle helm which, like those of the Chaplain and his Excoriators escort, was mag-locked to his belt. With his back to Deker, the Space Marine drifted across the breadth of the corridor, his armoured steps dragging drunkenly along with him. It immediately struck the squad whip as strange. The movements lacked the crisp certainty of the Adeptus Astartes and the discipline required of power armour operation.

  ‘Sir,’ Deker said, stepping to one side. Titus Rhaddecai came forward, the oddness no less lost on the Chaplain.

  ‘Brother, present yourself,’ Rhaddecai ordered up the corridor. The Space Marine did not. He stumbled and his pauldron scraped lazily up the wall. ‘Excoriator, you will do as you are bid. Present that which Dorn has given you for inspection and inform your corpus-castellan that Titus Rhaddecai is here to judge him.’

  When the battle-brother failed to acknowledge them, Deker and the Chaplain exchanged dark glances.

  ‘Are you injured brother?’ Deker put to the Excoriator as the squad whip advanced. ‘Are you sick?’

  At Deker’s approach, the Excoriator shuffled around. It was Deker’s turn to stumble. The Space Marine’s face was barely clinging to his blood-stained skull. What flesh remained was ragged putrescence framing the perfection of lipless teeth and a bone-fused bionic eye. The optic glowed with a life its owner clearly no longer possessed. The Excoriator’s plate was splattered with blood and spoilage while his gauntlets appeared to have been dipped in gore. In them, like some monstrous titan of myth and legend, the Space Marine held the half-eaten corpse of a Chapter serf.

  Deker’s response was instantaneous. The barrel of his boltgun came up as the squad whip backed towards Rhaddecai and his Excoriators escort. The corpse-Marine stumbled at them. Through rotting vision it recognised the Excoriators. For Deker, everything depended upon what was going through the Space Marine’s diseased mind, or what was left of it. Did it view the visiting Excoriators as brothers? As a threat? As the future contents of its maggot-swollen belly?

  The Space Marine tripped and groaned. It dragged one power-assisted leg behind the other. It came at them, and as it did a gargling roar erupted from its corrupted multi-lung. It was something base and primitive. An intention of unthinking hostility and harm. It boomed about the darkened passageways of the watch-fortress, loop-relayed through the plate’s comms-link and across the vox-hailers of the section. It was everywhere.

  ‘Stand down!’ Deker ordered, but the dead thing lurched on, unheeding. ‘Chaplain?’ the squad whip put to Rhaddecai.

  ‘So ordered,’ the Chaplain answered grimly.

  Fat bolt rounds tore through the corpse-warrior’s armoured knees. The savage bursts of shells chewed through plate and bonded plasteel, ripping through the bone and sinew of the joints. The thing went down with a crash, before reaching out for the Excoriators with its gore-splattered gauntlets. With ceramite fingertips clawing at the deck, the aberration hauled its armoured carcass towards them, driven on by an insatiable hunger. It wasn’t going to stop. With a second stream of bolt-fire, Deker blew the flesh-eaten head off the thing, spraying the walls of the Semper Vigilare with the brains of his battle-brother. Plate – both that of the aberration and the Excoriators escort – sighed to stillness.

  The Adeptus Astartes waited. Panic was a redundant state for a Space Marine. Like idle speculation, it was an unnecessary indulgence. They waited. They listened. From the depths of the watch fortress they could hear the corpse-warrior’s call of savage anguish answered by a cacophony of rasps, of moans, of the dread insistence of the dead. It was followed by the shuffling clunk of armoured cadavers drawn down on the section.

  ‘Spread out,’ Deker ordered, prompting Brothers Ezrapha, Ahaz, Udiah and Damaris to break formation. ‘Pattern Imbrica.’

  Funnelled into the arterial accessway of Docking Pier East, the seemingly undead had arrived. The flesh-stripped, the lifeless carrion, the corpse-hordes – ripe with the fruits of otherworldly corruption. Within moments it was wall-to-wall with bodies: fortress serfs, rag-robed enginseers and brother Excoriators, towering above the sea of wasted menials. Without weapons and helms, they were spoiling meat and armour, flooding the corridor with their fly-swarming stench. An involuntary bellow of flesh-gluttony erupted from the horde. The cleansing storm of consecrated fire unleashed from the half-squad’s boltguns was no less involuntary. Rounds punched through the rotting carcasses and hammered into the plate of corpse-Excoriators. The priesthood and Chapter menials dropped like a carpet of disease and corruption. The armoured and unliving stumbled and lurched into one another, knocked back by the onslaught. They clawed mindlessly at each other for anchorage, thrusting the ruin of their flesh-famished faces forward into the bolt blasts. They shambled into their
true deaths, the precision fire of the Excoriators demolishing skulls and boring through the armour plating to the putridity below.

  When it was over, when the last of the unliving had received the blessing of the Angels of Death, a dreadful emptiness settled on the scene. The bark of boltguns still echoed through the dark corridors of the Semper Vigilare watch fortress. Blood – black with age and virulence – drizzled from the ceiling and back down onto the bolt-mauled carnage below. For what seemed like an age, no one spoke.

  ‘What warp-spawned devilry is this?’ Deker asked finally.

  ‘We stand sentinel over the Eye,’ Rhaddecai replied. ‘We watch. We stare. And sometimes… the Eye stares back. Sometimes it drifts right up to the airlock, unannounced and unwelcome.’

  ‘Chaplain.’ The squad whip stopped him, little in the mood for Rhaddecai’s cryptic observations. ‘This is no longer a matter of cult censure. You should return to the Vitriol with your seneschal.’

  ‘Nobody’s going back to the Vitriol,’ Rhaddecai assured the squad whip. ‘We push on. Phanuel and I will make our way to the tactical oratoria where I expect the watch fortress’s machine-spirit will have some answers for us. You will take your squad and search the Semper Vigilare for survivors.’

  ‘Yes, Chaplain,’ Deker acknowledged. He headed up the gore-splashed corridor. It was choked with bodies. There was something strangely comforting about their stillness. Their end might have been violent, but the watch fortress garrison now enjoyed a kind of peace. Deker thought on the dead and Rhaddecai’s instruction that they search for survivors. The squad whip grunted. It was the survivors of this terrible plague that gave Deker most cause for concern.

  The Excoriators moved through the darkened corridor of the watch fortress with cold efficiency. The walls and the floor were spattered with brown blood and spoilage, testimony to the miseries endured. As bulkheads were opened and sections explored, the Excoriators were engulfed in swarms of dark movement and sound.

  Flies. Black and fat with gore. Their deafening drone rose on the foetid stench. The unliving were to be found everywhere. Stumbling. Shambling. Groaning their spiritual agonies. Deker and his Adeptus Astartes found them congregating in the shadows and gathered about flesh-stripped carrion, the sons of Dorn and their servants, reduced to rot-withered echoes of their former selves. Mindless frames of ruined magnificence, heretically decked in the honoured plate of their Chapter, dead Excoriators came for them. They could not help themselves. A terrible hunger drove them on. A need as imperative as it was unnatural.

  Deker felt sick to his pre-stomach. It wasn’t the rot. It wasn’t the indelible stench. These things did not bother an Adeptus Astartes. It was the appalling crash of his boltgun. Each round sending an Excoriator – one of his own, a brother both in battle and spirit – to oblivion. Their duty, down in the depths of the darkened fortress, wasn’t the execution of orders. It wasn’t war. It was extermination. Deker was there, on the dread edge of the Eye, prosecuting the intentions of an already hostile galaxy in which both the alien and humanity as enemy of itself wished an end to the guttering Imperium. In blasting through the crafted plate and flesh of the Excoriators – the living weapons of the Emperor’s grace harbouring the virulence of a spiritual darkness – Deker could not help but feel he was doing the great enemy’s bidding.

  As he vox-reported the north section of the Semper Vigilare clear to the tactical oratoria, it seemed as though the Chaplain had read his mind. Rhaddecai told him that it was a difficult duty, but that he was doing the Emperor’s work. Deker couldn’t bring himself to believe it. The squad whip suspected that the Chaplain was no less feeling the burden of their calling aboard the watch fortress.

  ‘Did you feel that?’ Brother Ahaz put to Deker as they moved into the west section. There had been a rumble through the starfort’s superstructure. Deker had felt it, and deep down he knew what it was. He found himself shrugging his pauldrons at his battle-brother. The west section was no less afflicted than the one they had just left. Mobs of wasted serfs howled their hunger at the Excoriators. Corpses reached out for them with the augmented strength of their plate. The section was saturated with decay. As the half-squad entered a hull-galleria, they were treated to the violaceous glower of the Eye, reaching in through a section of thick armaplas. The viewport was smeared with blood and brains. Handprints decorated the transparent surface with the suggestion of panic and maggots squirmed down through rivulets of liquefied blight dribbling their way to the floor.

  ‘Dorn be damned,’ Udiah swore. Framed in the port was the Vitriol, the vessel’s mighty engines turned towards the watch fortress and carrying the frigate away.

  ‘Whip?’ Brother Ezrapha put to Deker. The Excoriator nodded. He knew why the Vitriol was leaving them. He knew why the Chaplain had kept them busy clearing sections. He knew what Rhaddecai was about to say. For the sake of his squad brothers, he asked anyway.

  ‘My lord Chaplain,’ Deker voxed to the tactical oratoria.

  ‘Yes, squad whip?’ Rhaddecai came back after a static-strangled pause.

  ‘The Vitriol is leaving.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have the mission parameters changed?’

  ‘Considerably,’ Rhaddecai voxed back to the squad. His voice transferred from their suits to the section vox-hailers. ‘Have you discovered any survivors?’

  ‘No,’ Deker reported. ‘No one survived the onboard plague… and I suspect no one will.’

  Brothers Damaris, Udiah, Ahaz and Ezrapha looked at their squad whip. For a moment, Rhaddecia didn’t reply.

  ‘I concur with your assessment, Squad Whip Deker.’

  ‘Deker?’ Ezrapha said, then, to the Chaplain, ‘When is the Vitriol due to return?’

  ‘The frigate isn’t coming back,’ Deker told the Excoriator.

  ‘What?’ Damaris said.

  ‘Chaplain,’ Deker voxed. ‘Could you tell us what you’ve discovered?’

  ‘Interrogation of the fortress’s machine-spirit has revealed that a number of months ago the Semper Vigilare received the Adeptus Mechanicus forge tender Augmentra for minor refitting and repairs, as part of a scheduled tour of Astartes Praeses star forts and watch fortresses along the Cadian Gate. Cross-referencing the Augmentra’s identicodes with data from the Vitriol’s runebanks, we have discovered that the last time the Augmentra was sighted, it was running as a Death Guard Legion fleet tender, a consort craft attached to the Terminus Est.’

  ‘You have despatched the Vitriol to intercept the traitor?’ Deker asked across the channel.

  ‘Yes,’ Rhaddecai admitted. ‘The Augmentra is the capital ship’s envoy, infecting the path before the Death Guard’s exodus from the Eye, strategically knocking out fortresses on the Cadian Gate to allow the Terminus Est and Emperor knows what else unannounced passage into Imperial space. It must be stopped immediately.’

  The Chaplain allowed the Excoriators precious seconds for his dark discovery and realisation to sink in.

  ‘What of the Semper Vigilare?’ Ezrapha asked, his syllables slow and solemn. ‘What of us?’

  ‘Even the mightiest fortresses,’ Rhaddecai crackled over the vox-hailer, ‘our bastions among the stars, can prove vulnerable to attack. Semper Vigilare proved that. The Augmentra proved that. We are no less susceptible. Each Adeptus Astartes is his own castle, his own bastion with defences physical, biological and spiritual. Our fallen brothers, the traitors who make the Eye their home, failed in that defence. They were infiltrated. They were infected, perhaps by something as simple and dangerous as an idea. No less have we failed to fortify ourselves against the enemy in its myriad forms.’

  ‘What are you saying, Chaplain?’ Ahaz asked.

  ‘He’s saying we’re compromised,’ Torban Deker told his battle-brother. ‘That we’ve been exposed to this warp-borne contagion. That our defences were insufficient and that right now the enemy runs through our very veins, carrying the curse of the unliving through our bodies. We will become that which we
have sought to destroy, here in this place.’

  The squad was silent. Words seemed insufficient. Sentiment or spleen, a waste. Deker watched Damaris and Udiah look down to their boltguns.

  ‘What do we do? Deker asked grimly.

  ‘Nothing, brother,’ Titus Rhaddecai told him with uncommon tenderness. ‘This bastion has but one defence left to be deployed. I have done what Corpus Castellan Abnerath failed to. I have initiated the section immolation measures…’

  Deker felt it immediately. Doors opened. Vents flushed. Bulkheads rolled aside. In a distant part of the watch fortress, the Semper Vigilare’s machine-spirit had unleashed a firestorm that rumbled through chamber and corridor, barbican and accessway, cleansing each with roaring flame. The force of the purification fires feeling their way through the star-fort’s architecture turned the unliving to sculptures of ash and cinder before blasting them apart. The cursed brothers in their ceramite staggered through the inferno, their armour razed and the corruption of their diseased forms scorched from the honoured plate.

  Deker sensed the approach of the firestorm. The section was about to be bathed in cleansing flame. Across the vox-hailer, the squad whip heard the last gasp of Titus Rhaddecai as the immolation measures claimed the Chaplain. Damaris had a moment to murmur, ‘Emperor preserve us’. Udiah managed to reach out for the pauldron of Ahaz, his battle-brother and friend. Ezrapha and Deker just stared at one another, the Excoriator giving his squad whip a nod of acceptance.

  As the Adeptus Astartes became lost to him in the oblivion of galleria-consuming flame, Torban Deker kneeled. He brought one fist to his lips and kissed the gauntlet in honour of his Chapter Master and primarch. He was about to meet Lord Dorn. He wanted to be composed. Ready. A warrior prepared for the end. He spared a final thought for those that were to come after, the Excoriators who would find the Semper Vigilare scorched from the inside out. All that would be left of their unfortunate brothers would be ash. With any good fortune, they would find the watch fortress truly dead.