We were all, myself included, taken aback by the priest's appearance. Cogboys are always a little unusual — each of them in their unique, individual unsettling way — but seeing one bound like this was something of a first. One couldn't really tell where the man stopped and the machine began, and of course he was completely crazy. Candles of corpse-fat burned around him, their flickering light an offence to the God-Emperor, and I daresay they deepened the darkness rather than relieve it. How distasteful this place was! We should have burned it down here and then — or, rather, blown it to smithereens from the safety of our own bridge — but answers were needed. They promised to be concerning, to say the least.

Patient interrogation by the lord-captain and van Calox found out the priest's name was Magos Tiberius Mahla; from his disjointed answers, they confirmed the ship had indeed fled Kiava Gamma, and that the great Forge World had fallen to Chaos. Dire news indeed!

'The ship… the planet,' whispered the madman. 'Traitors, among our brethren! Tormenting the sacred mechanisms, letting corruption into their systems. They turned that which is holy into the unholy! They… they set these new, twisted machines on us, their tech-comrades!'

He broke into a complaint of binharic suffering and his one good eye rolled up, showing the white of his eyeball, that was infiltrated with a dark substance that wasn't blood. Magos Pascal replied with a soothing cant of his own; after a few minutes, Magos Tiberius became responsive again.

'You managed to flee,' said Her Ladyship.

A tear appeared at the corner of his eye and he thrashed frantically in the mess of wires piercing his body. 'We fought,' he rasped, calming down. 'We cut off one module after another, as one cuts away rotting flesh. But it followed.'

'What followed?'

'A… a monster.'

Van Calox bent to the priest, asking what kind of monster. The madman trembled, as if taken by a seizure, and didn't answer right away. He babbled, saying the monster had claimed them, one by one; it is my supposition that the monster claimed its victims' souls rather than their life, and it explained the surprising indifference (then aggression) of the enginseers and such we had met earlier. So it was a monster capable to submit people to its will! The pure horror of this, I find nigh unbearable: to become a heretic, not by choice, but by compulsive erasure of one's self! In the creeping obscurity of the chamber, I saw my own aversion reflected upon Sister Argenta's face; she had never lowered her heavy bolter since we had stepped in, and I asked her to shoot me if I ever showed signs of being so corrupted. She agreed, which immediately made me feel better. Meanwhile, the priest was spluttering words like diarrhoea; a thin trickle of mucus and spit dripped along his neck.

'The crew were merely humans of flesh and blood,' he said. 'They succumbed so easily… We could not save them from evil, and so we gave the ship to the darkness among the stars. But the darkness came for us too. In this last module, where we intended to make our last stand. Then I… sacrificed myself… I became a filter, a stopper against the corruption emanating from the machine. I succumbed… the corruption came for our souls. The corruption of Kiava Gamma…'

I am no Inquisitor, of course, wise in the ways of heresy, but I have to say what I could glimpse of the chamber indeed confirmed the priests had been corrupted. Why else would two of them have been crucified in the corners of the room? Magos Tiberius wasn't done; with the last of his efforts, he croaked that the Fabricator-Censor had been the one to let this taint into the sacred code. I have met the man, once before: although Lady Theodora, of course, mostly dealt with the lay governor, the Fabricator-Censor was our diplomatic link to the Adeptus Mechanicus. He hadn't made a strong impression on me, save for the fact that he had replaced his lower half by four scuttling legs instead of the customary two, and the resulting movement had awoken an urge to smash him with a slipper like an oversized cockroach.

'He was the one who doomed our brethren,' cried the priest. 'He was the one who spawned the steel monstrosities in the furnaces of our planet!'

His breathing laboured. A true seizure took him and left him limp, a black drool seeping below his respirator. Van Calox put his hand on the man's chest, concentration hardening his face, and shook his head. Be it from his biomancer powers or from the natural clarity that often comes before the end, Magos Tiberius then appeared to regain some measure of consciousness — enough for him to raise his head a little and look at Her Ladyship. What a look! What a demented confusion, aflame with hope!

'Rest in peace,' she said. 'You will be avenged.'

By the Golden Throne, I'll be damned if it wasn't a laugh that wailed through the man's vox implant! Hard as it is to read a cogboy's expression, I saw something akin to thankfulness on his face.

'I was a part of the great force that drives the universe. I do not fear… the cold of death.' A wheezing breath escaped his chest. His eyes closed — but something still lurked there, in the twilight of his dying brain. Something that, now there was no human filter on its perception, had at last understood there were outsiders on the ship and that those were a threat. Never can this mortal man be praised enough for resisting corruption to the last, and protect us that long by blinding the thing that lurked! A thing that ran to us through the ship, the cacophony of metal hitting metal announcing it like a herald of destruction! It now burst in the chamber from an access corridor wide enough to fit a Salamander and it was… How can I describe its terrible appearance? Mechanical it was in nature, obviously so, but it was more than that; it was a horrifying mix of realspace technologies and the deranged powers of the Warp. Van Calox later called it a Daemon Engine, and I must say it is a fitting name, as it was definitely an engine and also demoniac. I had never seen such mighty piston-driven limbs affixed on such an eldritch engine of war, and I pray I never shall lay eyes on one again! The spirit — being — inside was quite mad with lust for death and destruction, and our bright, loyal souls certainly must have made a juicy target! A pungent smell of brimstone followed it, along the evil cold of a thinning Veil, choking me for an instant. Once its eyeless mockery of a head had taken our measure, it fired its auto-cannons, sending us scuttling into whatever cover we could reach. Flames of demonic taint lit up the chamber; servo-skulls howled hymns of heresy to sustain the thing's resolve; I swore to end it or die trying! (I have often taken such an oath, and I have never died yet!)

Van Calox and I rushed to the thing; our Interrogator was bellowing the Emperor's name, his powers bringing us all a much needed burst of supplementary vigour, and before I struck I braced myself for the worst. No sooner had my power hammer crashed against one of the thing's legs, in an attempt to make it lame, that it hit me in an unexpected counter attack — a terrible blow which sent me flying back several meters! The landing was hard, and yet I was thankful to be down, for Sister Argenta's heavy bolter exploded in thunder and a hail of bolt rounds flew right over me. Magos Pasqal incanted a blessing of the Omnissiah's: to soothe the Machine Spirits of our weapons, to excite them to deadly accuracy against our foe's — and to condemn our enemy's to the confusion and distress which pave the path of aggression against the just. Her Ladyship had taken Lady Cassia's place as leader of our force, and it was then I first witnessed the full extent of our dear Navigator's powers. Directed by Her Ladyship, Lady Cassia positioned herself a little way off. The jewel on her forehead, I knew, was in fact a clear lens — much like glasses — covering her third eye, but long habit had brought me to disregard its importance.

I saw Lady Cassia open her third eye, and couldn't avert my gaze in time. Where she Saw, she tore the Veil away from reality — for an instant, I beheld the Warp without protection, without Gellar field, without anything to shield me from the crawling, boiling, screeching energies that poured from it. I glimpsed souls burning in bale fires and heard the screams of the damned. I trembled before vicious tides — rogue waves of mindless turmoil, that engulfed themselves in our world and tore at the very fabric of reality. A servo-skull splintered and crashed. Some of the plates that covered the Daemon Engine were ripped away and the creature within howled with the pull of its native dimension. It retaliated, but its shots went wide and Lady Cassia stood like a victorious queen. She closed her third eye, lest the wound in realspace invite more terrible beings yet, and Her Ladyship pulled her down behind a lectern. A vertigo seized me; I would have found it impossible to move if not for Her Ladyship's authoritative voice that whipped me back into shape. Oh, the comfort brought out by absolute trust in one's commander! It was enough that I could scramble back away from Sister Argenta's line of fire, and I threw a krak grenade for good measure.

How could I convey the absolute mayhem that was this fight? We were deafened by the endless explosions of bolter rounds finding their target. We were blinded by the Daemon Engine's inner fires. We were bedazzled by Lady Cassia's grasp on the Veil. My arms ached for hitting our enemy when next I charged him, and when I landed a strike that severely damaged one of its auto-cannons my shoulder went numb. Magos Pasqal's hymns of war were lost behind Sister Argenta's screams of faithful calls. And all the while the thing stubbornly refused to go down, even missing a limb, an auto-cannon, armour! Again and again it came at us, rabid in its thirst of destruction. Only when it was near crumbling did its will fail it — and it had gotten us all badly. When the evil spirit that it housed fell back, unshackled, into the Warp, Magos Pasqal was down and we all bled and limped. Van Calox and I helped him up; we were in no state to rush, so we carefully ambled back to the shuttle. Her Ladyship called for the pilot and enginseers to our aid in boarding. She grimaced with pain when she helped Lady Cassia — a open wound on her scalp that would make a fine scar, but for now made her weak with blood loss — fasten the crash webbing of her seat. Sister Argenta and I applied a medi-kit to our Magos's wounds; despite the fact that it couldn't repair his mechanical parts, it appeared to do him good, and his breathing evened.

Thankfully, the flight back to the Emperor's Mercy was a short one. The chirurgeons had their way with me — torn rotator cuff, nothing — and, if the lord-captain didn't wait for me like she has done for others in similar (although admittedly graver) circumstances, she was gracious enough to get the chef to send a hearty meal to my quarters. It is very late now. This day's entry is done, and I need sleep like I rarely did.

I cannot remember when the War Room was last used — my memory is a bit foggy about that, which is strange — but the lord-captain got it properly dusted off and we had a lengthy meeting concerning Kiava Gamma and what we might find here. Archives were pulled. Her Ladyship tried to pry information about the Final Dawn from van Calox, which was a resounding failure, to no one's surprise; whether that was because he knows nothing and is ashamed of it, or knows everything and decided a Rogue Trader, with all of her power, is unworthy of such knowledge, is anyone's guess. Anyway, his informant's intelligence about a possible Chaos infiltration on the planet is laughably out of date, as what we witnessed aboard that cogboy's ship speaks of a full-blown heretical cult. I shouldn't laugh about van Calox's embarrassment, the situation being grave enough, but, well, I have my flaws.

The discussion boiled down to our ability to take down the cult on our own. Once located, we could leave the Cranach system behind — push to Dargonus instead and collect the von Valancius fleet there — but this would take weeks, if not months, and the longer the cult is left to fester on its own, the worse it will be. Or we could risk landing a spearhead, so to speak, and try our luck. Orbital bombardment, of course, is out of the question, as the infrastructure must be preserved at all costs.

Sister Argenta volunteered to lead a recon unit first and test the waters. 'If the martyred priest was right,' she said, 'locating the Fabricator-Censor must be our goal. God-Emperor willing, his unworthy death will be enough to destabilise the heretics, and give us time to get reinforcements from Dargonus.'

I, myself, argued for a more heavy-handed approach. Although the troops we do have aboard the Emperor's Mercy are still a bit green, having suffered such heavy losses in our crossing of the Maw, it would be possible, with enough numbers, to overcome the skitarii who will defend major installations. Her Ladyship listened, biting her thumbnail; I plotted for her on a map the foreseeable bottlenecks and rough strategies we could use.

At last, she said: 'It could work. The human cost would be prohibitive, though.'

True, I acknowledged, but these men and women live to serve the von Valancius dynasty. Dying liberating Kiava Gamma from the evil corruption of Chaos would be the highpoint of their lives. Faces around the table weren't in agreement, though: Mistress Heydari and Mistress Tlass looked positively incensed, dear Lady Cassia was doubtful, van Calox lamented the loss of the advantage of stealth, and Magos Pasqal emitted a string of disharmonic binharic cant. Only Sister Argenta looked favourable, presumably because she would get to lead a company.

'Sometimes, a little bloodshed is necessary,' I concluded.

'And what would we do,' countered Her Ladyship, 'if when we reach Dargonus we find out that we need ground troops to take it back? The protectorate being in the sorry state it is, I dare not hope that everything's fine there.'

Oh, my entrails turned to ice at the thought! It cannot be, surely, that Dargonus has fallen to rebellion or the Ruinous Powers, too! Clementia wouldn't stand for it! No, no, I must trust in my family to keep order in the crab-bucket that is the protectorate capital. Her Ladyship looked at my trouble with compassion, I felt, and she said in a softer voice: 'You understand why I cannot afford to gut my regiments.'

'Why, yes, lord-captain.' I babbled; she was right, how had I not seen that? How long had I been gone from Dargonus? How many years? Still, losing face is a luxury I cannot afford: people only trust a First Officer as long as he projects an image of strength, so I affirmed my certainty in my family's ability to maintain the equilibrium between rival noble factions. 'Dargonus will sooner light itself on fire rather than fall prey to the machinations of Chaos,' I added proudly.

'Two options that are not mutually exclusive,' muttered van Calox. Her Ladyship shot him a hard glance, and that shut him up.