Milo shut his eyes again.
In the rear of the slender cockpit, strapped in his G-chair, Commissar Gaunt craned his neck round to see past the pilots and the astropath and look through the narrow front ports. Chart displays flickered across the thick glass and the ship was bucking wildly, but Gaunt could see the target coming up: the hive city called Nero, poking up out of the ochre soil through a caldera ninety kilometres wide, like an encrusted lump of coal set in a plump navel.
'Sixty seconds to landfall,' the pilot said calmly. His voice was electronically tonal as it rasped via the intercom.
Gaunt pulled out his bolt pistol and cocked it. He started counting down.
High above the sunken city of Nero, the troop-ships came down like bullets, scorching in out of the cloud banks. Anti-air batteries thumped the sky.
Then the cotton-white clouds began to singe. The fluffy corners scorched and wilted. A dark purple stain leached into the sky, billowing through the cumulus like blood through water. Lightning fizzed and lashed.
Leagues above, Kreff paused and stared. Something was discolouring the atmosphere far below. 'What the—' he began.
'Weather formation!' the co-pilot yelped, frantically making adjustments. 'We're hitting hail and lightning.'
Gaunt was about to query further but the shaking had increased. He glanced round at the astropath, suddenly aware that the man was uttering a low, monotone growl.
He was just in time to see the astropath's head explode. Blood and tissue painted the pilot, co-pilot, Gaunt and the entire cabin interior.
The pilot was screaming a question.
It was a psychic storm, Gaunt was horribly sure. Far below them, something of unimaginable daemonic power was trying to keep them out, trying to ward off the assault with a boiling tempest of Chaos.
The ship was shaking so hard now Gaunt could no longer focus. Multiple warning nines flashed up in series across the main control display, blurring into scarlet streaks before his rattling eyes.
Something, somewhere exploded.
The vibration and the shrieking didn't stop, but they changed. Milo suddenly knew that they were no longer crash diving into attack. They were simply crash-diving.
He wasn't feeling sick any more. But the wicked incincerated-in-a-hypervelocity-crashlanding-voice started to crow:
There was impact…
…so huge, it felt like every one of his joints had dislocated.
There was sliding…
…sudden, shuddering, terrifying.
And finally…
…there was roaring fire.
And, as if as an afterthought…
…complete excruciating blackness.
Hundreds of Imperial troop-ships were already well below the doudbank when the psychic typhoon exploded into life, and so escaped the worst of its effects, levelling out, they descended on the massive citadel of Nero Hive like a plague of locusts. The air was thick with them, ringing with the roar of their thrusters as they banked in and settled on the wasteland outskirts of the towering black city-hive. Traceries of laser and plasma fire divided the sky in a thousand places, making it look for all the world like some insanely complex set of blueprints. Some struck landing ships which flared, fluttered and died. Flak shells sent loud, black flowers up into the air. Marauder air-support shrieked in at intervals, moving in close, low formations like meteorites hunting as a pack, strafing the ground with stitching firestorms.
Above it all, the purple sky boiled and thrashed and spat electric ribbons.
At ground level, Colonel Colm Corbec of the Tanith First-and-Only led his squad down the ramp of the troop- ship and into the firezone. To either side, he could see lines of ships disgorging their troops into the field, a tide of men ten thousand strong.
They reached the first line of cover – a punctured length of pipeline running along rusted pylons – and dropped down.
Corbec took a look each way and keyed in his micro-bead comm link. 'Corbec to squad. Sound off.'
Voices chatted back along the link, responding.
By Corbec's side, Trooper Larkin was cradling his lasgun and looking up at the sky with trembling fear.
'Oh, this is bad,' he murmured. 'Psyker madness, very bad. We may think we had it hard at Voltis Watergate or Blackshard deadzone, but they'll seem like a stroll round the garden next to this… '
'Larks!' Corbec hissed. 'For Feth's sake, shut up! Haven't you never heard of morale?'
Larkin turned his bony, weasel face to his senior officer and old friend in genuine surprise. 'It's okay, colonel!' he insisted. 'I didn't have me comm link turned on! Nobody heard!'
Corbec grimaced. 'I heard, and you're scaring the crap out of me.'
They all ducked down as a swathe of autocannon fire chewed across the lines. Someone a few hundred metres away started screaming. They could hear the piercing shrieks over the roar of the storm and the landing troop-ships and the bombardment.
Just.
'Where's the commissar?' Corbec growled. 'He insisted he was going to lead us in.'
'If he ain't landed, he ain't coming,' Larkin said, looking up at the sky. 'We were the last few to make it through before that happened.'
Next to Larkin, Trooper Raglon, the squad's communications officer, looked up from the powerful voxcaster set. 'No contact from the commissar's dropcraft, sir. I've been scanning the orbital traffic and the Navy band,
