decade. His grasp of tactics and morale is strong. If there is ever a moment when it looks as if your arrogance or your pride are going to make you do something stupid that will get good men killed, the good commissar here will take steps to rectify the situation, with a bullet through your head.
'Do I make myself clear,
The muscles in Laron's jaw clenched and he felt his cheeks redden.
'Yes, brigadier-general, I understand your meaning perfectly, sir.'
'Good,' said the tall man, turning and walking around his desk before sinking into his leather chair.
'You are dismissed, officers of the 72nd. Not you, acting colonel.'
His face burning, Laron stood motionless as the other men filed out of the room.
'Now,' said the brigadier-general, 'we need to establish how to get a victory after your devastatingly average attack against the highlands.'
They had awoken him and the other surviving members of his worker team from their allocated two-hour rest break by throwing a bucket of warm water over them. Or, at least Varnus had thought it was water at first, until he tasted it on his tongue: it was blood, fresh and human. The overseers coughed vilely, what passed for laughter amongst them, and jerked at slaves' neck chains to get them to their feet.
The dreams were getting worse. The blaring of the Discord never ceased, and he heard it as he slept, the hideous sound seeping into his brain like a vile parasite, twisting and corrupting within him. It was no release from torment when he closed his eyes and fell into fitful sleep. No, if anything, his dreams were worse than his waking life. He saw a world utterly consumed by Chaos, its sky a roiling miasma of fire and lava. The land was not truly rock or soil, but a pile of skinless, moaning bodies that stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions. For all he knew, the planet was made entirely from these mewling, bloody wretches. Every one of them had a metal star of Chaos bolted to its forehead, the same mark that he also bore. Endless, monotonous chanting filled his head, intoning words of worship and praise. He saw this place every time he closed his eyes, not just when he slept, but every time he even blinked his eyes against the sulphurous, polluted air.
Varnus stumbled along with the other slaves. He looked around in confusion as they turned off the well-worn path leading towards the tower that rose nearly a hundred metres into the air and headed off in a different direction. He saw his confusion mirrored in Pierlo's wild eyes, his only true companion here in this living hell.
Someone is here already, he said to himself. He could feel it in the air. Liberation was at hand. He prayed to the Emperor,
He grinned stupidly at the thought.
Dully, he came to his senses to find that the line of slaves had stopped.
'On your knees, dogs,' said an overseer in his grating voice, the translator box over its mouth vibrating.
Without thought, he dropped to his knees. The overseers produced long, rusted metal spikes, and walked behind the line of slaves. They pulled the chains backwards violently, dropping the slaves onto their backs. Standing on the chains to either side of each slave, they hammered the heavy chains to the ground with the thick spikes.
Within moments, Varnus heard screaming from other slaves, but from his position he could not see what was happening. All he could see were the slaves directly to either side of him. On one side, a man cried, his eyes tightly closed as he mouthed the silent words of a prayer. The star upon his forehead was clearly visible, and steam seemed to rise from the skin around it, forming blisters. The stink of burning flesh reached Varnus's nostrils. Needle-tipped fingers plunged into the man's neck abruptly and he convulsed frantically, his prayer forgotten. His head stopped steaming and Varnus realised that it must have been the prayer that had caused the reaction.
Turning to the other side, he saw Pierlo looking at him closely with his crazed eyes.
'What now?' hissed the man. He didn't seem overly distressed to Varnus, but perhaps that was his way of dealing with this horror. He envied the man, briefly.
'What new torture is this?'
The dark figures of chirurgeons loomed over Varnus. They were loathsome creatures, their hunched forms covered in shiny, black material. There was an unholy stink about them that made him gag, and their arms ended in arrays of needles, clamps and syringes.
Something was writhing in the hands of the hateful surgeons and he felt sickness pull within his gut at the sight of the vile, wriggling thing. It was a small, mechanical, flat box that looked somewhat like the translator machines that the overseers spoke through. However, the thin sides of the box were coated in a smooth, black-oily skin that pulsed with movement from within. Four short, stubby tentacles waved from the corners of the box, fighting at the chirurgeon's grasp. His gaze was forcefully removed from the vile blend of mechanics and daemon spawn as a further pair of black-clad chirurgeons pulled his head around.
'Open your mouth,' came the voice of an overseer at his ear, but Varnus resisted. Pain jolted through him as the overseer ran one of its needle fingers along his neck, and he opened his mouth wide in a cry of pain. The chirurgeons darted eagerly forwards with their mechanical hands, whirring power clamps gripping his front teeth. Without ceremony, the teeth were ripped from his jaw. Blood poured from the holes in his gums and he groaned in pain.
Yet the chirurgeons had not finished their brutal surgery. Gripping his head tightly, one of them leant forwards with another mechanical device, and Varnus tried to pull away from it desperately, blood running down his throat and spurting over his chin. He could not escape the attentions of the twisted, hunched chirurgeon, however, and as its partner hit Varnus's lower jaw to close his mouth, the first sadistic creature slammed its mechanical device into the side of his face.
A metal, barbed staple, half a hand-length wide, punched through the bone of Varnus's jaw and cheek, pinning his mouth closed. The metal bit deep into the bone, and Varnus gargled in agony. A second staple punched into the bone on the other side of his face.
That was when the black, tentacled thing was brought towards him. The chirurgeon thrust the fighting thing at his face and Varnus screamed, his jaw stapled shut, in pain and terror. He tried to turn away, but his head was held tight and the box was placed over his mouth.
He screamed and screamed as the four questing tentacles probed his skin, the touch stinging and burning his flesh. The tentacles felt their way across his face, and with horror he realised there was a fifth, thicker tentacle pushing through the gap in his front teeth and into his mouth. No, it wasn't a tentacle, he realised as his tongue touched the vile thing. It was a hollow, fleshy tube, and as it entered his mouth it began to expand and push itself down into his throat, flattening his tongue against the base of his mouth.
Two tentacles latched under Varnus's jaw, burrowing into his flesh to secure a tight hold, and the remaining two leech-like appendages wriggled across his cheeks, probing at the corners of his eyes before burrowing agonisingly into the skin at his temples. He roared in excruciating pain, the sound alien and strangely mechanical to his ears, altered by the thing clamped firmly over his mouth and nose. He breathed in deeply which was heavy and difficult, and he felt a foul, sickly sweet taste in his mouth and nose.
White-hot pain shot through his head as the tentacles burrowed further into his flesh. They ceased wriggling within him, but the pain remained. His breathing was laboured and the figures above him went hazy, spots of light appearing before him, and he fell into the nightmare of his unconsciousness.
The warriors of the Adeptus Mechanicus stepped inexorably forwards, like a seething, relentless carpet, spread out across the hard-packed salt plain. Some amongst them were almost human, though even these were hard- wired into the weapon systems they bore, their brain stems augmented with mechanics and sensors. The Coryphaus had seen their like before. He had fought against loyalist members of the Cult Mechanicus on their Forge Worlds during the advance on Terra ten thousand years earlier. More recently, he had fought alongside those members of the Machine Cult that had long sworn their allegiance to the true gods, the powers of Chaos.
Sheer cliffs rose up on either side of the valley their tops hidden by dark, brooding, heavy cloud. The rumble of thunder boomed from the heavens and flashes punctuated the dark, threatening sky. The insides of the massed, bulbous clouds lit up as lightning crackled within, arcing, skeletal fingers of electricity that clawed across their
