served the Emperor. The men who brought you here are Imperial heretics, and their enterprise is criminal. My purpose here is to stop them. I intend to press on at once on that mission. I cannot vouch for the safety of any who follow me, but I count it as a mark of honour to the Emperor himself that you will. He needs our service here, now. If you take seriously the oaths you made to the Imperium when you became guardsmen, then you will not hesitate. There is no more vital battle in which you might give your lives/
Wild, frightened faces stared back at me. There was a murmur of agreement, but these were young inexperienced men, some no more than boys, who had been thrown into the deep waters of madness.
'Steel yourselves, and know that the Emperor is with you and for you in this. I don't exaggerate when I say the future rests in our hands.'
More voluble assent now. These men weren't cowards. They just needed a purpose and a sense that they were fighting for a worthy cause.
I whispered briefly to Fischig and he immediately stepped up and raised his voice to the Imperial creed, and the song of allegiance, hymns that every child in the Imperium knew. The Gudrunites joined in lustily. It centred and focused their determination.
Still, the booming came along the shore.
With Betancore's help, I stripped arms and equipment from the fallen. There were enough weapons to make sure every man had a lasrifle or a hell-gun. We also managed to assemble three intact naval trooper uniforms, mixing and matching from the dead.
I stripped off my bulky vacuum suit and began to put on the polished black combat armour of a naval security trooper. Midas attempted to do the same, but his build was too slim for the heavy rig. The troopers were, to a man, large brutes.
We dressed Fischig in the armour instead, and then, so as not to waste the third set, chose a heavy-set Gudrunite from Jeruss's group, a corporal named Twane.
'What's the Gudrunite command channel?' I asked Jeruss as I adjusted the helmet vox set.
'Beta-phi-beta.'
'And of the men you left in there at the plateau, how many others might side with us?'
'All the Gudrunites, I would say. Sergeant Creddon's unit, certainly'
'Your job will be to rally them to us when we get inside. I'll give the word.'
He nodded.
We left the wounded on the shore, as comfortable as we could make them, and advanced into the dark uplands.
As Jeruss had told me, it quickly became darker and warmer. The sleek black body armour I was now wearing had an integral cooling system, but
it didn't seem to help. And the wrongness still afflicted us. It was difficult to walk without stumbling in places.
We came upon the first of the arches, and Jeruss led us through, though we would have been able to follow the course without difficulty. Footsteps and the tracks of heavy vehicles had left deep prints and ruts in the soft dusty soil.
We were advancing up a cluster of hills, dark and uninviting with a glowering sky above. There were many-rows of arches, some overlapping. We became disoriented. It seemed on occasions that as we passed through one arch, we came out through another in a different row. The tracks never wavered or broke, but we seemed to blink between one aisle of hoops and another. And the angles of the joints in the arches were – as Jeruss had said – geometrically incorrect.
'I think,' Aemos said quietly to me as we walked onwards, 'the lack of symmetry is in every particular and every dimension.'
'Meaning?'
The three we can see and the fourth – time. Dimensions have been stretched and warped. Perhaps accidentally. Perhaps to torment us. Perhaps for some other purpose. But I think that is why things are so twisted and wrong.'
We came at last upon the place Jeruss had called the plateau. It was a flat- topped mound nearly a kilometre across, smoothly tiled with octagonal tesserae that mocked logic. The sides sloped down to the dusty soil and all around, the site was ringed by ragged brown peaks and crags. Above, the sky was dark and flecked with stars.
On our side of the plateau, a semi-circle of several hundred men sat huddled around the rim, waiting. I could feel their tension. More than half of them were Gudrunites; the others were troopers. Smaller groups of soldiers stood in ordered ranks further towards the centre of the plateau, escorting two navy troop carriers in which figures sat, and a pair of empty landspeeders. A pile of crates had been removed from the carriers and piled on the tiled ground.
On the far side of the plateau, a row of arches led away into the surrounding rocks.
We lay in cover and waited, watching.
After an interminable period, there was movement on the far side and figures emerged from the arches. Even at a distance, I could tell they were Dazzo and Malahite, with four naval troopers in escort. They came out briskly, signalling to the main group at the vehicles. All the troops around the rim got to their feet.
Other shapes now appeared through the arches. They were impossible to define at first; grey, reflective shapes that had no human form or intelligible movement.
I took out my scope, and trained it on them, carefully resolving the magnification.
And I saw the saruthi for the first time.
There were nine of them, as far as I could tell. They made me think of arachnids, or crustaceans, but neither comparison was entirely accurate. From their flat, grey bodies extended five supporting limbs, jointed in such a way so that the main mid-limb joint was raised higher than the horizontal torso. There was no symmetry to the arrangement of limbs, or to the way in which they moved. Their scuttling pace was irregular and without repetition of order. It was disturbing merely to watch them walk. Each limb ended in a calliper of polished silver, a metal stilt clasped in the digits of each limb, lifting them a further metre or so off the ground. The metal spikes of the stilts made a clacking, tapping sound on the hard tiles that I could hear despite the distance. Their heads were oblate shapes rising on thick, boneless columns from the tops of their bodies. They had long skulls and lacked obvious mouths or eyes, though several flaring, nostril-like openings showed on their snouts. There was no symmetry to the arrangement of these openings either, nor to the shape of the skulls, and their necks sprouted off-centre from their backs.
They were loathsome, filthy things. Each creature was twice the mass of a man, with gleaming grey flesh.
Shouts and noises of alarm came from some of the waiting men. Several turned and fled from the plateau, scrabbling, wailing.
The nine saruthi clicked their way out into the open from the hoop, fanning out until they formed a semi-circular line facing Dazzo and Malahite. I saw Oberon Glaw, Gorgone Locke, Estrum and the monstrous form of Mandragore descend from the vehicles to join their comrades.
I confess that I was, by then, as afraid as those with me. I have seen horror, and horror itself does not terrify me. Nor indeed was there anything horrific about these beings. Alien, yes, and as a puritan that was alarming. But objectively, they were impressive, striking creatures; assured, almost majestic.
My fear stemmed from a deeper, gut instinct. As with this world we had entered, there was a wrongness to them, to their shape, their movement, their design. Each scuttling limb, each swaying head, betrayed an unholy nature. I could not have believed how reassuring symmetry could be, and how distressing might be its lack. They were warped things, warped from any civilised sense of grace, any human
