Salamander

The rash of fatalism flashed across Dak'ir's mind as he put another servitor down. Despite his training, the many hours of drills, the constant honing of his skills and building of his endurance, the brother-sergeant was beginning to tire. They'd sustained casualties. Brother Zo'tan was limping; S'tang had a fierce dent in his battle-helm that had probably cracked his skull; several others nursed shoulder or arm wounds and fought one-handed.

Tsu'gan raged against the inevitable, easily killing twice the servitors of any of his battle-brothers. Even Pyriel, with all his psychic might, was hard-pressed to keep pace with the rampant brother-sergeant's tally. Fatigue, to Tsu'gan, was an enemy just like the automatons. It had to be fought and bested, denied at all costs.

It was little wonder he carried such sway amongst the other sergeants of 3rd Company. But even Tsu'gan's will had its limits.

Something hard and heavy struck Dak'ir across his unguarded left flank. White heat flared behind his eyes as he felt his rib plate crack. Blood was leaking down the side of his power armour, black and thick like the oil of their adversaries. Darkness clawed at the edges of his vision. As he fell back, he saw the face of his killer - pitiless eyes stared back at him from above a mouth obscured by speaker-grille, framed by skin with a deathly pallor. Dak'ir thought of the robed figure in the temple as his body met the ground, his inevitable death playing out in slow motion.

With its final, indecipherable words the magos had damned them all.

Muted thunder brought

Dak'ir around. He'd been out for a few seconds before his body's physiology staunched his wound and clotted the blood, repaired his bones and sent endorphins to his brain to block the pain. He wasn't dead, and with that realisation others followed.

Muzzle flares lit the gloom in the vaulted ceiling above, the

thud-crack

of bolter fire emanating from the gantries. Something heavier accompanied it, a dense

chug-chank, chug-chank

of a belt-fed cannon, the grind of tracks rolling against steel and the creak of metal stanchions pushed to their limits.

Dak'ir was back on his feet before he had even told his body to rise, and in the killing mood. His chainsword hadn't stopped churning even as he fell, and the teeth found fresh flesh to chew as the Salamander fought.

Through snatched glimpses in the melee, Dak'ir caught the flash of yellow and black armour, the snarl of a painted skull, predator's teeth daubed down the edges of a coned battle-helm. As the barrage of enfilading fire continued from either flank, ripping up servitors, a further epiphany materialised in Dak'ir's mind. Their saviours were Astartes.

Caught between such forces, the servitors finally began to thin out and fall back. Not out of fear or even any remote sense of self-preservation; they did it because some nuance in their doctrina programming had impelled them to. Emek would later theorise that the casualties the combined Space Marines had inflicted were such that they endangered the minimum output capacity of the forge-ship and this protocol, entrenched in one of the Mechanicus's fundamental paradigms, overrode any others and resulted in capitulation. The machines simply lowered their tools, turned and retreated. Some were slain as they retired from the fight, the last vestiges of battle-lust still eking out of the blood-pumped Salamanders. But the majority left intact, shuffling back to slumber until they were called upon by their masters to engage in their work routines once more. It was an order that would never come - for Dak'ir was certain now that the magos in the octagon temple had been the last aboard the

Archimedes Rex.

As the bolter fire of the mysterious Astartes died, so too did the light cast by their muzzle flares and they were thrown back into obscuring shadow. Dak'ir considered utilising his optical spectra to penetrate the gloom and get a better look at them, but decided to wait as they marched heavily down the gantry. A pair of lifters stationed at either end of each one brought the Space Marines down to yard level, where the Salamanders could see their allies clearly for the first time.

Dak'ir was right; they were indeed Space Marines - ten of them, broken into two combat squads reunited when the lifters hit deck-plate, plus a Techmarine who manned a battle-scarred mobile gun platform. The war machine rumbled on steel-slatted tracks, cushioned on a bed of vulcanised rubber. Its design was narrow, ideally suited to the close confines of the Mechanicus ship that had prevented Brother Argos's much-needed, as it transpired, inclusion in the mission. The STC used to construct the gun, a pair of twin- linked autocannons with a modified belt-feed, looked post-Heresy but pre-Age of Apostasy. Similar in essence to the Space Marine Thunderfire cannon, the platform also bore the hallmarks of a Tarantula-cum-Rapier-variant mobile weapons system - something the Adeptus Astartes hadn't used in either form for many millennia. The example before the Salamanders was evidently based on archaic designs.

The Space Marines themselves appeared to be just as archaic. Most wore Mk VI Corvus-pattern power armour, stained yellow with a black cuirass and generators, the left pauldron studded with fat rivets. The armour's plastron was bereft of the Imperial eagle, and carried only an octagonal release clasp, unlike the modern suits of the Mk VII Aquila-pattern. Every suit amongst them, bar none, was patched and chipped. The rigours of battle were worn proudly as marks of honour, in the same manner as the Salamanders' branding scars. It was armour that had been made to last, not in the sense of its superior forging or exceptionally durable craftsmanship; rather, it was battle-plate that had seen hundreds, perhaps thousands, of victories and been strung back together and hammered into shape by any means necessary in order that it saw another.

Bolters were no different. Lengthened stocks with the extended shoulder rest were an antiquated version of the Godwyn pattern Mk VII carried by the Salamanders - albeit with Nocturnean refinements. Drum-fed and carrying sarissas - a saw-toothed bayonet-style blade affixed to the gun's nose - the bolters hefted by the yellow-armoured Astartes were the sorts of outmoded weapons best left to museums.

But these warriors were hard-bitten veterans, every single one. They didn't have the forges or the technological mastery of the Salamanders. They were seldom re-supplied or their materiel restocked or replenished. They knew only war, and fought it so relentlessly and without cessation that their equipment was battered almost to destruction. As the leader of the Astartes stepped forward, his honour markings indicating he was a sergeant, and proffered a hand, Dak'ir was struck by a final revelation:

These were the other intruders aboard the

Archimedes Rex.

'

I am Sergeant Lorkar,' the yellow-armoured Astartes spoke in a grating whisper, 'of the Marines Malevolent.'

CHAPTER THREE

I Malevolence

'Brother-Sergeant Dak'ir, of

the Salamanders 3rd Company,' replied Dak'ir, who found he was facing Sergeant Lorkar. After a moment's hesitation,