A/n - so, no updates in a while but hopefully this chapter will whet your appetites and mine. Been working my way through a bit of a block but hopefully I'm on the road to recovery. Enjoy!

Lita gnashed her teeth in frustration. While the Orrax regiment was outside dying to defend the colony, here she was lumbered with guard duty. She paced the antechamber like a caged animal, trying in vain to make out what was being said in the room beyond the door. Vaughn had told her to prevent all disturbances while the doctor performed his examination, but the hab-block was deserted apart from Lita and her squad. It was a pointless exercise.

And who joined the Imperial Guard to guard stuff, anyway?

Pars trotted around the corner and into the room, his insolent grin and roguish saunter momentarily absent, replaced with a look of urgency.

'Sarge, we've got 'nids inside the city limits… proper 'nids! Darron's calling for aerial cover and we're the only people left in Gurshun with wings.'

'What? Where are the other Valkyries?'

'They transferred up to the Pelligus zone to help with the evac this morning!'

'Right, get the lads ready to move. I'll clear it with the black-top!'

Disturbances or no, this was life or death. She opened the door a crack and got Vaughn's attention. He stepped through into the anteroom with irritation clear in his posture.

'Sir, things have really gone to spit out there. We've got 'nids running riot through the city and Darron's having trouble keeping them contained.'

'What can you do about it, sergeant?'

'I want your permission to take the Valkyrie up to provide aerial cover. They need a spotter to get the situation under control.'

Vaughn nodded curtly.

'Very well, sergeant, permission granted. Send one of your men back to guard this door and then you're free to do what you can.'

'Yes sir.'

The courtyard was vibrating with engine noise when she got there, the Valkyrie prepped and ready to lift. Lita caught up with Pars just in time to see him and one of the others hoisting a metal barrel up the cargo-ramp.

'What's this?'

'Napalm, boss. Thought it might come in handy,' Pars replied with a grin. Lita rolled her eyes and shook her head.

'Does the pilot know you're loading his bird with large amounts of volatile inflammable jelly?'

'Err… well, we, err… thought he might have, err… you know, like, err… feelings on the matter… so we, err… kind of didn't tell him, like.'

'Get it on board quickly, then. We need to get in the air.'

xxx

Grampion had almost managed to stem the tides pouring up out of the hole. Several broods had managed to escape the cordon and he could only pray that Corgan was able to cope with them. He dreaded to think what might happen if there were more than one of those tunnelling things.

'Sir!' cried Harris, his vox man. 'I've got the first sergeant on the horn…'

Grampion grabbed the vox-horn.

'This is Grampion!'

'We're incoming on your position, Captain,' came Kierst's reply. 'Darron apprised me of you situation. I think I may have a solution…'

'We'll take whatever you've got, sergeant.'

'Then I'd advise you to get your men into cover, sir!'

xxx

Lita pulled the hatch down in the compartment wall, giving her a view of the cockpit controls and the pilot crew. By his pips she could tell that the Valkyrie commander was a lieutenant. He outranked her in the air, but this was a Guard matter.

'Afternoon, boys. I've got an unusual request for you.'

'Fire away, sergeant.'

'I was wondering if you wouldn't mind putting us directly over that great big hole in the ground over there and opening the rear hatch.'

'You're not going in there, surely…'

Lita hesitated to reply, wondering how best to phrase her confession.

'Not exactly,' she started. 'Just be ready to apply some forward thrust when I bang on the partition… there may be some backwash from the explosion we intend to set off!'

'What the hell have you brought onto my bird, sergeant?'

The pilot obviously wasn't stupid. He'd probably been ferrying Guard about his entire career, likely he had a thousand stories detailing the kind of stunts they'd pulled. She hoped this one made it into his repertoire, even if it wasn't entirely her idea.

'Just do it, fly-boy, my friends are dying down there…'

She closed the hatch and moved to the side hatch while Pars and the others got the canister ready and braced themselves for the opening of the rear hatch.

'Hold on to it until I give the word,' she shouted. 'Do not let go of it too soon, for all our sakes!'

Pars just grinned even wider, he was relishing this.

xxx

Grampion watched as the Valkyrie hoved into position directly above the hole. The rear hatch cranked open even as the last of his men were diving into cover. The 'nids were starting to swarm around the lip of the hole, ignoring the occasional volley of covering fire coming from the more gung-ho members of his outfit.

'Whatever you're going to do, sergeant, you better do it now!' he growled.

His words were like prophecy. A metal canister rolled off the ramp and dropped like a bomb into the gaping maw of the Tyranid borehole. There was a moment of silent anticipation that seemed to stretch into eternity, the Valkyrie started to pull forward away from the hole, almost in slow motion. Then the hole erupted like an angry volcano. Flaming rubble and alien biomass fountained upward. The blast wave put Grampion on his buttocks, his eye-brows were singed by the heat-wash.

'Was that prom?' he asked, nerveless with surprise.

'Naw, Cap, that was napalm, sure as sure!' Harris whooped, ecstatic.

'Throne!' Grampion swore, trying to gather his wits. 'Alright, get the boys formed up. I want Haines and Gorne or cleanup duty. The rest of us are moving up to support the front line.'

Ferio Company quelled their boyish excitement and started hustling. Two platoons settled back to guard the hole and track down any bugs that had slipped the cordon while the other three buckled up and headed out.

With any luck, some of them would live to see the sunset.

xxx

'It comes!' Hestor Luek screamed, making Vaughn and the little medicae jump. They were the first coherent words to come from the man's lips since they'd brought him in. Vaughn grabbed the man's shoulder while the medicae moved to the other side. Together they tried to quell the man's thrashing.

'What comes?' Vaughn replied.

'The devourer… the great devourer comes!'

The fanaticism in the man's words did not bode well. The parasite attached to his medulla oblongata was exerting its control. The man's resistance was being steadily eroded and there hadn't been a damn thing Vaughn and the medicae could do about it.

'We know that, you fool. We need to know about the cult… tell us about the cult!'

The man's struggling subsided somewhat, his eyes narrowing.

'A cancer festering at the heart of the colony…' he whispered. 'I thought it was a sub-cult of the Imperial Creed. They tricked me and now look what I have become…'

The man's skin was turning blue. The blotchiness radiated out from where the parasite punctured his skin and had reached the man's jawline. His irises were yellow, the whites of his eyes jaundiced. He was being changed at the cellular level, mutated into one of those half-human things they'd fought to recover him from.

There was no future for Hestor Luek that did not involve death. The only question was whether it would be quick and painless, a bolter round to the temple, or slow and agonising. The change would not kill him, it would paralyse him with pain but it would not kill him. And then when the hive rolled over Gurshun he would surrender to the devourer and his biomass would be just so much fuel for the machine.

But he had resisted. He had tried to continue in his service to the Emperor. His faith had been so strong that even the alien hormones flooding his system could not wrest complete control from his inner psyche. He could potentially save them all, but they were losing him.

'I need to know how I can track them down, man. Give me something I can use…'

Hestor screamed again as the thing in the back of his head squirmed, pushing its intrusive proboscis deeper into his brain. Sweat laced with blood beaded on his forehead and his thrashing intensified for a few brief moments.

There was almost no mass on the man. It was obvious that he was severely malnourished and his strength had been sapped by his exertions. He was fading fast, even the brain-leech could not sustain him for much longer.

A moment of clarity seemed to wash the pain from his features but only for a moment. He gasped his final words almost too low to be audible. Vaughn lowered his head to catch all that he could.

'…the church… they recruited me there… man called… Fabian… he is theeaaargh!'

Hestor Luek was gone, an alien sentience, with a desperate flush of lethal hormones had taken full control of his faculties and bit down hard on Vaughn's ear, crunching through the cartilage.

Vaughn cried out, pulling away hard and leaving the bloodied rags of half his pinna in Luek's mouth. The medicae was shoved away, not strong enough to hold the possessed man on his own. He struck his head on the wall and fell unconscious as Luek surged to his feet and launched himself at Vaughn, who had to let go of the bloodied stump of his ear to clamp both hands around Luek's throat.

The man's strength was inhuman, but his co-ordination was poor. Vaughn suffered several cuts and gashes to his face and neck as the man thrashed, but thirty seconds of strangulation was enough to ride out the artificial rush of adrenaline that had kept Luek's corpse alive.

Hestor Luek's end was better than it might have been, and Vaughn had a lead. All in all a fairly successful day, despite everything that had gone wrong. Now all he had to do was hope that he would get the opportunity to follow it up. If the defence faltered, it wouldn't matter anyway.

xxx

The Trygon was fast for something so big. From above it resembled a sidewinder snake, undulating through the narrow byways of Gurshun. Lita watched as Darron's squad came at it from the side, irritating it with their hellgun fire and scoring its thick hide with their melta weapons.

It was heavily heat resistant, probably because of the amount of friction it would create when boring its tunnels, as a result, they were struggling to hurt it significantly enough to slow it down even with their heaviest weapons.

Already it had rendered three hab-blocks unstable with its violent passage and it was getting perilously close to the fuel dump that was keeping the Pardus manoeuvrable. If it got that far, the defence would be made a hell of a lot more difficult and any thoughts of a counter-attack would be in jeopardy.

Their only hope lay in the imminent support of two of the Pardus hunter-killers, but they'd have to get their treads moving if they were going to arrive in time. Pars and Rhys were manning the heavy stubbers, unloading streams of high calibre rounds onto the thing from above. It hardly even caused an itch for all she could tell.

'Where the hell are those big guns,' she griped.

Quaig took it as an order and put out a call, receiving a garbled reply back.

'They've been delayed,' he said. 'One of Grampion's squads were hunting stragglers in the area they're coming in by when they walked into an ambush. There's a running fire fight and they're wary of advancing through the area without infantry support.'

'Why would they be afraid of civilian insurgents? They can't possibly be well enough equipped to take out a tank!'

Quaig shook his head.

'Apparently some of the Pardus tanks have been sabotaged throughout the morning. Civilians with survey charges have been knocking out turret tracking servos and treads. They won't risk their rides without some infantry watching their backs.'

'And Grampion's men are too busy, I take it?'

'I'd say so. Apparently they got hit pretty hard.'

'Alright, get Shopal on the line and give him the Pardus' current location. We need those big guns and we need them asap!'

She turned back to the open hatch and looked down at the beast. It had turned on Darron's men and forced them to scatter. One of them was skewered on the creatures scything talons before he could get clear, his body fell in two pieces and the Trygon continued on its inexplicable journey through the suburbs of Gurshun.

xxx

Shopal followed Antillus' directions to cut through a narrow alleyway that should deposit them onto the Via Cantaro, three blocks from the Pardus hunter-killers and two from whatever disturbance remained.

Antillus roved ahead, checking every nook in the alleyway that could possibly conceal a rogue 'nid. Two metres behind him Shopal trotted shoulder-to-shoulder with Farls, the other six members of his squad brought up the rear.

They were making good time as they emerged onto what they thoughts was the Via Cantaro, but Antillus stopped short in the middle of the road.

'What's the problem?' Shopal hissed.

'Er, I think we're lost…'

'Define lost!'

'This isn't Cantaro. We should be able to see the Kalliko Merchant House from here but all I see are habs and more habs…'

'Are we even going in the right direction? You do have a compass…'

'Yeah but it's useless in here,' Antillus complained, giving his auspex a shake. 'We're surrounded by magnetic structural supports that are confusing the compass.'

Shopal cocked his head to one side and turned to pick up the sounds of warfare and get his bearings..

'Okay, so the battle is over that way… and we came from over that way… meaning we continue in this direction until we hear shooting or spot the tanks. And gimme the damn auspex before you break it!'

Shopal was in the middle of a major sense-of-humour breakdown. It was bad enough that they'd been held in reserve to start with. At least the Trygon had given them something to do. Now he was lumbered with babysitting a couple of soft-bellied Tanker boys and then only if he could find the frakkers first. Antillus was in more trouble than he knew but he'd save the "reprimands" for later.

The squad moved on.

xxx

The hab block was deathly still. The only sounds were those made by the two men as they rolled Hestor Luek into his body-bag and lifted him to the gurney. The wheels squealed and spun as Medicae Vasser rolled it out of the room, heading for the elevator that would take him down to the basement level they were using as a makeshift morgue after the bombing of the hospital.

Vaughn stayed behind, muttering in low tones with the trooper who'd been guarding the door. Vasser felt a stirring of fear in his guts as he realised he'd be venturing into the basement alone.

It wasn't the bodies that scared him, not even that of the mutant. He was inured to death after a decade of ministering to the Imperial Guard in war zones across the segmentum. No, it wsn't the bodies.

The things he'd seen today had rocked the foundations of his faith. That a man such as Hestor Luek, a devout and steadfast man, could be reduced to such a bloodthirsty freak did not sit well with Vasser. It was not death that frightened Medicae Vasser, but that which came after death. If Hestor Luek could find damnation despite everything, then the same could just as easily happen to Vasser himself.

He fingered the silver Aquila pendant at his throat and began to mutter the litanies of Faith under his breath as he rode the elevator down into sub-level three. It gave him little comfort, but a modicum of courage.

He wheeled the gurney out into the dimly lit corridor. Tube-lighting flickered a way down and beyond it was only darkness.

'Damn!' Vasser swore, quietly. The room he needed was beyond the flickering light. Reaching into his satchel he took out a small torch used for testing pupil dilation. It wasn't enough to give Vasser any comfort, but he'd be able to find the right door, at least.

With a sense of enormous foreboding, the Medicae ventured into the shadows, the squealing of the gurney's wheels echoing from the cold hard walls of the corridor.

He found the right door and propped it open, wheeling the gurney into the frigid basement room and hastily backing towards the door, casting about with his pathetically inadequate torch. The hairs had lifted on the back of his neck and his skin crawled. Some of this could be attributed to the low temperature, but the shiver that ran up his spine was raw, primal fear.

A sound broke the near-silence. A sucking sound, followed by the cracking of bones, a sound Vasser was well used to, but not in such eerie surroundings.

'Who's there,' he called, his voice ringing from the undressed walls and ceiling of the broad room.

A skittering sound off to his right caused him to wheel about. Another, deeper in the room brought him about again. He backed towards the dim outline of the open door, his torch casting demonic shadows and catching the dust motes but doing little more than that.

'Probably just rats,' Vasser muttered to himself, but he wasn't convinced.

As he reached the doorway, the skittering became frantic, coming rapidly closer and getting louder. Vasser bolted, running for his life from Emperor knew what kind of horror. Bogey men from his distant childhood took a death-grip on his imagination and the terror clamped around his chest like bands of iron. The skittering pursuit continued to gain ground.

He reached the lighted hallway and turned to see what it was that was chasing him. He instantly wished that he had not.

The elevator door beckoned to him and he dived into the car, punching buttons frantically. They began to slide shut, too slow, too damn slow to stop the clawed freak with its gaping maw lined with needle-like teeth.

It pounced, hampered not at all by the closing doors, and landed on top of the catatonic Vasser, who couldn't even summon up a scream as the Ravener tore his belly open and clamped its jaw around his shoulder. Its talons entered his body, puncturing lungs and liver and tearing his left kidney free of his body. Ribs cracked and his collarbone gave way with a splintering snap.

Pain flooded Vasser's fading consciousness even as his blood sprayed the walls and flooded the floor. They thrashed together in a heap of human and alien flesh, the creature wrapping him in a deathly embrace as it coiled about his spasmodic form.

He passed out before the end, the Emperor's last mercy to a man that had after all been allowed to keep his faith to the end of his days. Three floors up, the elevator reached its first stop and the bell pinged as the doors slid open.

With eyes that burned like the fires of purgatory, the Ravener turned from it victim and slithered out into the brightly lit corridor, leaving a trail of blood in its wake.