Helsreach

channel. 'Reclusiarch?'

'Speak.' The Chaplain sounded distracted, and faintly amused. 'What is it?'

'I've lost Priamus's life signs, sir. No heightened returns, just an immediate severance.'

'Confirm at once.'

'Confirmed, Reclusiarch. I verified it before contacting you.'

'Brothers,' the Chaplain said, his voice suddenly ice. 'Maintain search and destroy orders.'

'What?' Artarion drew breath to object. 'We need—'

'Be silent. I will find Priamus.'

He wasn't sure

what they hit him with.

The greenskins had melted from their hiding places in the darkness, one of them carrying a weighty amalgamation of scrap that only loosely resembled a weapon. Priamus had slain one, laughing at its porcine snorting as it fell to the deck, and launched at the next.

The scrap-weapon bucked in the greenskin's hands. A claw of charged, crackling metal fired from the alien device and crunched into the knight's chest. There was a moment of stinging pain as his suit's interface tendrils, the connection spikes lodged in his muscles and bones, crackled with an overload of power.

Then his vision went black. His armour fell silent, and became heavier on his shoulders and limbs. Out of power. They'd deactivated his armour.

'Dorn's blood…'

Priamus tore his helm clear just in time to see the alien racking his scrap- weapon like a primitive solid-slug launcher. The claw embedded in his chest armour, defiling the Templar cross there, was still connected to the device by a cable of chains and wires. Priamus raised his blade to sever the bond even as the alien laughed and pulled a second trigger.

This time, the channelled force didn't just overload his armour's electrical systems. It burned through the neural connections and muscle interfaces, blasting agony through the swordsman's body.

Priamus, gene-forged like all Astartes to tolerate any pain the enemies of mankind could inflict upon him, would have screamed if he could. His muscles locked, his teeth clamped together, and his attempt to cry out left his clenched jaw as an ululating, shuddering

''Hnn-hnn-hnn''.

Priamus crashed to the ground fourteen seconds later, when the agony finally ceased.

The greenskins hunch

over his prone form.

Now they have managed to bring him down, they seem to have no idea what to do with their prize. One of them turns my brother's black helm over in its fat-knuckled hands. If it means to turn Priamus's armour into a trophy, it is about to pay for such blasphemy.

As I walk down the darkened corridor, I drag my mace along the wall - the ornate head clangs against the steel arches. I have no wish to be subtle.

'Greetings.' I breathe the word from my skulled face.

They raise their hideous alien faces, their jaws slack and filled with rows of grinding teeth. One of them hefts a heavy composite of detritus and debris that apparently serves as a weapon.

It fires… something… at me. I do not care what. It's smashed from the air with a single swing of my inactive maul. The clang of metal on metal echoes throughout the corridor, and I thumb the trigger rune on the haft of my crozius. The mace flares into crackling life as I aim it at the aliens.

'You dare exist in humanity's domain? You dare spread your cancerous touch to our worlds?'

They do not answer this challenge with words. Instead, they come at me in a lumbering run, raising cleaver swords; primitive weapons to suit primitive beings.

I am laughing when they reach me.

Grimaldus swung his

mace two-handed, pounding the first alien back. The sparking force field around the weapon's head flashed as it reacted with opposing kinetic force, and amplified the already inhuman strike to insane levels of strength. The greenskin was already dead, its skull obliterated, as it flew twenty metres back down the corridor to smash into a damaged bulkhead.

The second tried to run. It turned its back and ran, hunched and ape-like, back in the direction it had come.

Grimaldus was faster. He caught the creature in a handful of heartbeats, hooked his gauntleted fingers in the ork's armoured collar to halt its flight, and smashed it against the corridor wall.

The alien grunted a stream of curses in Gothic as it struggled in the knight's grip.

Grimaldus clutched at the creature's throat, black gauntlets squeezing, choking, crunching bone beneath his grip.

'You

dare

defile the language of the pure race…' He slammed the alien back, breaking its head open on the steel wall behind. Foetid breath steamed across Grimaldus's faceplate as the ork's attempt to roar came out as a panicked whine. The Astartes would not be appeased. His grip tightened.

'

You dare desecrate our tongue?'

Again, he bashed the greenskin back, the alien's head splitting wide as it struck a girder.

The ork's struggles died immediately. Grimaldus let the creature fall to the metal decking, where it hit and folded with a muffled thud.

Priamus.

The fury was fading now. Reality asserted itself with cold, unwanted clarity. Priamus lay on the deck, head to the side, bleeding from his ears and open mouth. Grimaldus came to his side, kneeling there in the darkness.

'Nero,' he said quietly.

'Reclusiarch,' the younger knight returned.

'

I

have found Priamus. Aft, deck four, tertiary spine corridor.'

'On my way. Assessment?'

Grimaldus's targeting reticule flicked over his brother's prone body, then locked onto the scrap-weapon carried by the orks he'd killed.

'Some kind of force-discharging weapon. His armour is powered down, but he's still breathing. Both his hearts are beating.' This last part was the most serious aspect of the downed knight's condition. If his reserve heart had begun to beat, there must have been significant trauma done to Priamus's body.

'Three minutes, Reclusiarch.' There was the dampened suggestion of bolter