Salamander

machinations be revealed. It bothered him that he could not.

'Vulkan's fire beats in my breast,' he intoned as the presence in the catacombs detected his doubts and sought to feed upon them, using them to widen the tiny cracks in the armour of his faith, 'with it I shall smite the foes of the Emperor,' the Chaplain concluded, gripping the haft of Vulkan's Sigil and drawing strength from the hammer-icon's proximity.

No matter how hard he stared at the cannon, the obscurity around the ''lens'' remained.

T

he din of

clunking machinery filtered up to them in the tunnel. The sounds were coming from a glowing opening below. Lava stench and the prickle of heat came with it. The mines were just ahead.

'Stay back, Val'in,' Dak'ir warned, stepping ahead of the boy and shielding him with the bulk of his armoured form.

The boy did as he was told, but gasped as he spied a shadow looming ahead of them at the base of the tunnel.

Brother Apion saw it too, having moved to take point, and aimed his bolter, about to fire.

'It's already dead,' Pyriel informed him, his eyes fading from cerulean blue.

'An Iron Warrior husk,' noted Dak'ir, his vision adjusting to discern the bare metal ceramite and the distinctive black and yellow chevrons marking the armour. The same as the redoubts. 'Advance with caution, brothers.'

Apion lowered his bolter a fraction and led them on.

At the base of the tunnel, the Salamanders found a natural gallery of rock. The machine noise - the whirring of drills and the chugging report of excavators - became louder. Long shadows cast from moving forms in a larger chamber beyond streaked the walls at the end of the gallery.

There were more ''sentries'' here - iron-armoured deterrents staged in ready positions abutting the walls. Val'in cowered, the natural fear emanating from the long dead corpses still very much alive for him.

Ba'ken brought him close, leaning down as far as his bulk allowed and whispering, 'Stay close to me, child. The Fire Angels will allow no harm to come to you.'

Va'lin nodded and his mood eased a little as he crept closer to the pillar of ceramite that was Brother Ba'ken.

Dak'ir failed to notice the exchange. His attention was on Apion, who had reached the end of the gallery and was poised at the threshold to the chamber. Dak'ir joined him seconds later and stared out into a wide expanse of rock. Here and there, struts of metal supported the cavern roof above. The empty shells of mining equipment lay strewn about the cavern like a machine graveyard, burned out and discarded once their usefulness had ended. Dak'ir saw boring-engines, bucket-bladed diggers, excavators and tracked drill- platforms. Servitors, slumped over their vehicles or piled up in corpse heaps, were a testament to the incessant overmining.

In addition to the machines, there were three stages, made of metal and lofted a metre off the ground on stout legs. Two of the three were flat and empty. The third was stacked with rotund metal barrels. Dak'ir didn't need to look inside of them to know they were brimming with fyron ore. The third stage was nearest to the source of the machine noise: a short but gaping tunnel shrouded in gloom. The Salamanders had entered the cavern at a slight angle, and through his enhanced eye-sight Dak'ir made out two servitor-driven drilling engines, like the ones the settlers had used in their ambush, and a bulky excavator rig on thick tracks, dragging away the useless rock and earth expelled by the drilling engines' labours. This too was worked by a servitor, hunch-backed and cable-slaved to the machine as if it were an integral part of its being. All three automatons were akin to the ghoul-drones encountered in the cannon's arming chamber.

The low lighting cast by sodium lamp packs suspended on cables steam-bolted to the cavern roof framed the grotesque faces of the ghoul-drones evilly. Their masters were not far away.

Three Iron Warriors stood at the drilling tunnel's threshold, overseeing the work. They carried combi-bolters with barrel-mounted sarissa-blades, low slung on straps around their spiked pauldrons. Chips of rock scudded off their armour, such was the Iron Warriors' proximity to the mine face, and they were veneered in grey dust.

In the distance, a six-wheeled loader transported a cache of fyron ore barrels on its burgeoning flatbed. The vehicle rumbled on fat treads towards an opening at the back of the mine that led into unknown darkness.

A second six-wheeler was on its return journey and approaching the partially laden stage where another load of barrels awaited it. A pair of cargo-servitors - their arms replaced by twin- pronged lifter claws - shambled into view as the loader closed on them.

In the loader's wake, a group of figures was revealed.

Dak'ir's jaw clenched and he felt a ripple of anger pass through his body.

Kadai's slayers, the Dragon Warriors, were here.

There were three of them, armoured in blood-red ceramite that was scaled in places as if the suits themselves had somehow mutated. Their gauntlets ended in gore-tipped claws and a strong reek of copper exuded from their bodies. They were once Space Marines, these creatures; now they were renegades in service to the Ruinous Powers. Slaves to darkness and damnation.

One wore a helmet fashioned into the image of an ancient saurian beast. Two horns curled like dark red blades from both temples of his battle-helm. A cloud of fiery embers gusted from a snarling, fang-fringed mouth grille in time with the renegade's rapid breathing. Heat haze emanated from the Dragon Warrior, giving his form a sense of unreality.

Another cradled an archaic multi-melta, scarred with kill-markings. His battle- helm was bare but came to a stub-nosed snout that was rendered in bone. Skulls attached to bloody chains hung from his scaled pauldrons and he wore what looked like deep-red lizard hide over his abdominal armour. Dust particles spilled from his armour joints with every movement. To Dak'ir's enhanced sight they appeared like tiny flakes of epidermis and the Salamander was instantly put in mind of a serpent shedding its skin.

The last of them Dak'ir knew well. Flanked by his two warriors, this one's burning red eyes were ablaze as if he were constantly enraged. The smouldering anger was emulated by the scarification on his face, which was a horrific patchwork of burned skin and lacerations. Old welts and tracts of melted flesh ravaged his onyx-black visage. A horn curved from each of his pauldrons and he seized a crackling force staff in a clawed gauntlet.

This was Nihilan, sorcerer and architect of Kadai's destruction.

'Renegades,' snarled Apion, and Dak'ir heard the Salamander's fists crack.

'Ba'ken,' said the sergeant, his gaze never leaving his nemesis. They should have scoured these tunnels days ago. Dak'ir had sensed something here. His visions all pointed to it. Even Tsu'gan had suspected, and still they'd done nothing. Well, now the time for inaction was at an end.

An icon appeared in the visual display of Ba'ken's battle-helm, sent over from Dak'ir's with a single eye blink.

'Target acquired…' rumbled the hulking trooper, moving forward to level his heavy flamer.

The loader had almost reached the stage and the ghoul-drones were approaching it when a gout of superheated promethium streaked across the chamber and ignited. The spear of flame burst through the pair of drones, setting them ablaze, but that was merely a glancing blow. Its intended target, the loader itself, exploded a few seconds later as its fuel cells were cooked and the volatile liquid within