Sky Falling

Part I

By author Perfidious Albion

On the planet Tenebris IV, in the southwestern Perseus Arm
The year 757 of the 30th millennium

"RUN!"

So they ran. A woman held back, reaching her pale arm out to the man who had called her to go, stubbornly refusing to abandon him. Three crying small children clung to her, though she tried to urge and usher them away. "Go! Leave me!" the man shouted, and one of the children did; but his wife would not, and the other two stayed close to their mother and their father, whose leg was trapped in rock. He had stumbled as the ground shifted. Now his knee was a bloody mess with the off-white glare of protruding bone.

The rocks shifted again. It was quite sudden—no rumble, no warning. The man only had time to scream before the ground gaped open. He disappeared into the trembling earth, swallowed up alongside his wife and nearly all his family.

Most of the crowd had not stopped for him. There were hundreds of them: men, women and children in ash-stained suits, dresses and casual clothes. It was mute testimony to the fact that, mere days ago, they had been in an ordinary day at the office on a Civilised World. Tense, perhaps, as they had heard their planet's rulers were talking with these strange newcomers from the stars, but all the humdrum of day-to-day life. Now they were all intent on one goal: survival.

Gouts of scourging flame burst forth from underground, dodged by the human refugees as best they were able. Writhing purple tendrils swirled and stretched across the sky. The air was smoggy and choking and seemed to shimmer with something which was like heat but was not—a certain energy to the air, a power, a pressure. There was the feeling of something waiting to happen, not yet happened. A potential, like a tightly coiled spring.

A victorious shriek resounded in the air, and the refugees looked to the sky in terror. "It's them! They're here!"

The people scattered. Small groups—men, women, children running as fast as their stubby legs could carry them—ran in every direction. Some families were scattered between groups, and piteous cries were heard from sundered parents and children; but they did not stop. Not even the weeping five-year-old split from her parents stopped running. They would have been dead by now if they were fool enough to stop at times like this.

A hail of what seemed like birds came diving down out of the sky. As they grew closer, it became clear that these were no birds. They were twisted, monkey-like creatures, with many long hairy limbs, cruel beaks and talons, spots bubbling with yellow ooze, and hideous-scented breath that stank of meat, raw and rotting.

The flying creatures fell upon the helpless refugees like starving wolves on helpless sheep. Small as they were—no more than a metre in size—they were ferociously strong. Their hairy limbs grasped humans by the neck and plucked them off the ground with nary a grunt of exertion. And as they carried them away, they devoured them. Sharp beaks and claws dug deep into human flesh.

More than a few of the flying beasts flew at each other, stealing prey, ripping and tearing at each other with their claws, even eating their corpses. These beasts were not above cannibalism. Other times, they entered some vile semblance of cooperation, and pairs of bird-things tore at the same human together, taking turns gouging out lumps of flesh as their victims wailed in agony.

The greatest number of the birdlike monsters flew for the centre of the group of refugees, for the greatest number of prey-kind. That was why the humans had scattered, knowing this. That was the paradox of life on Tenebris IV. Life alone was impossible. One could not survive the dangers of the planet unaided. But a group of humans that grew too large could not survive either, for they would attract the predatory beasts that ruled the skies.

One family, by some miracle, had managed to stay together: a man and woman, brother and sister-in-law, and his niece, a child. They had been a whole extended family group. Only these three remained; yet in this time that was perhaps a blessing. For the murder of crows came after more abundant prey. These had a chance of escaping.

They fled, the man carrying his little niece in his arms, the woman pulling him along whenever her weight made him stumble against the heaving earth. The feasting monkey-birds grew further distant. They were going to make it.

Then the ground in front of them broke open and an orange gout of flame spurted up, singeing his beard and her tattered scraps of a dress. They had to stop, losing all of their momentum. A pair of killer birds began approaching. The family moaned in despair. It was as if the very world beneath their feet was conspiring against them.

The two malformed flying things were coming closer and closer. The man clutched the child in his arms. The toddler was crying. He looked for a way past the sudden wall of flame. He found none. Passing the child to the woman, he picked up his best weapon—a length of pipe from a ruined house—and hefted it in his hands, testing the weight. It would not do much against the monstrous bird-things, and the man knew this. But it was all he had.

A hairy, oozing monkey-bird dived at him, steely talons extended, beak greedily gaping for a meal…

Crack!

…and shrieked and expired, its chest blown out by a thunderous bang of a detonating bolt. Chunks of gore and monster-guts rained on the ground, only to swiftly dissolve into ethereal plasm. Its companion, the other bird, wheeled around in a panic, wishing to flee. It did not get the chance. Another crack! and it too fell, struck by a high explosive shell which detonated within its ribcage.

Three immense men in shining armour vaulted out of the wall of flames, unaffected and undaunted by the inferno around them. They were huge and powerfully built, with muscles clearly bulging underneath the ceramite plates and whirring servo-motors of their Power Armour. Each looked like he could lift a boulder one-handed. Maybe they could.

"You alright, there?" said the leading man, not unkindly. His helmet briefly rose, not for long, just for half a second, revealing an ordinary face, with dark brown eyes and brown hair close-cropped. It was enough to prove that he was human.

"Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" the smaller man and woman babbled.

"Brother-Captain, do we have time for this?" asked one of the big men in Power Armour.

"Yes," said the leader of the giants. "These are humans. Our duty is to protect the human species, in the Emperor's name. We always have time for that."

"Incoming," warned another of the men in armour.

Their leader smiled coldly. "As anticipated."

A great cloud of bird-like monstrous things had amassed to come diving at the big men. They were thousands strong. They did not stand a chance.

From a hilltop kilometres distant, the crack of bolter shells rang out. The beasts were mown down by a murderous fusillade. The bird-things scattered. It did not save them. More men in sky-blue armour appeared across the battlefield, and they cut a swathe through the flying beasts with rapidity, ease and grace. The monkey-spider-birds were fast, cruel, cunning, and stronger than they looked. They were overwhelmed contemptuously easily.

It ought to have been humanly impossible to shoot such fast beings with a near-perfect rate of hits. But the men in blue were not genetically ordinary humans. They were the Emperor's Space Marines, and they had duty to be done.

Once the killing was done, the Brother-Captain spoke to the crowd, gently and firmly. "Ladies and gentlemen, it is best if you stay here. Running is tempting, I know." He held up a hand to silence cries of protest. He spoke over them: "The harsh truth is that nowhere else on this planet is any safer than here. If you stay, we know where to find you. My comrades-in-arms can come for you and bring you to safety. If you leave, they will not know where you are."

There was a shuffle in the crowd, then a tall man in red clothing was shoved to the front of the ground by other men's pointed elbows and pointier stares. He was a handsome fellow of late middle age, with greying black hair, well-built by the standards of most, though he looked puny next to the giants in blue Power Armour. He bore a symbol of some ten-legged animal, local to this planet, on a badge pinned on his chest, which the Space Marines recognised as the planet's insignia for healing. The doctor had been acclaimed as spokesman of the crowd, not by seeking it, but just because a doctor was vaguely an authority figure and there was no-one else.

"Who are you?" said the doctor.

"I am Brother-Captain Vergilius Masimus, of the Imperium of Man," said the leader of the sky-blue giants. "We came here to free your world and bring it to unity with the rest of mankind, our species, divided by xenos cruelty and Abominable Intelligence treason. Our Emperor, beloved by all, is leading mankind to a glorious future for all of us—you, me, everyone. For all humans are kin. Your planet should have joined freely, as did many others. Your rulers proved…" He grimaced. "… uncooperative. We always knew god-worship is evil, but we did not know they were so…"

He waved a hand, encompassing everything: the fire-scarred landscape, the quaking rocks, the lines of vivid pink and black and green and purple spiderwebbing across the sky.

Tenebris IV had seemed a normal planet, once. Its people had thought it was one. The Imperium had come here late in the Perseus Illumination. Most of the western Perseus Arm has been secured for the Imperium by the great hosts led by the Golden Primarch. Many worlds had joined without a fight. Tenebris IV had looked like it would be one of them.

This should have been a swift, routine Compliance. Certainly the world's rulers—mainly a plump old king—had seemed amiable at first. But when the Iterators spoke of the Imperium's attitude to religion, negotiations had been cut off almost immediately. That had been a fortnight ago. The Imperials found out in later days that the upper caste of Tenebris IV were not an aristocracy, as they had first thought, but a priestly caste. The king was a puppet, a figurehead devoid of force. The 'lords' who ruled supposedly on his behalf were not lords by birthright. They were lords by right of being initiated in the mysteries of a book which was considered 'too pure and too holy' for its secrets to be revealed to the general population. Ordinary men and women had to go to their priests and rely on their word for spiritual salvation. There were many planets with religions like that in the galaxy. "Mystery cults", the Emperor said religions like this had been called in ancient days before the fall of Old Night; and he would know, for he was those days' only survivor alive today.

The ensuing Imperial offensive had scattered the mystery cult's armies and seized many cities. It seemed the war would soon be won. But where the Tenebrians' armies had failed them, their cruelties had not. Unwilling to accept defeat and Compliance with the Imperial Truth as any sane man would, the strange, conspiratorial, priestly elite that ruled Tenebris IV had instead turned to darker means than mere bombs, blades and bolters.

Pleading for the power of their imagined gods to be unleashed on the Imperium, they had sacrificed their own people by the millions. The purge had been swift and without mercy. Secret police loyal to the mystery cult had broken into private homes and dwellings, seemingly at random. Old and young, man and woman, adult and child, the chained victims had been dragged to the altars by Tenebris IV's wild-eyed hordes of fanatics, brainwashed since their raising as orphans by the god-worship cult. And they had deployed some strange technology that twisted the earth and the sky.

Even now, Brother-Captain Masimus did not think he understood what they had done. That did not matter. He knew what did matter: it needed to be stopped.

The doctor nodded. He did not know either. Whatever the Tenebrian elite had done, it obviously terrified the other Tenebrians just as much as it disconcerted the Imperials.

"What are you going to do now?" the doctor asked.

Vergilius Masimus smiled grimly. "We are going to walk straight into the epicentre of this nightmare, find your rulers, and kill every single one of those god-worship bastards who did this to you."

The doctor thought about that for a moment. Then he lifted his chin up and looked the giant Space Marine face-to-face, eye-to-helmet-lens.

"Good."

The Brother-Captain and his battle-brothers plunged fearlessly forward into the dark. It felt as if the very air and earth were against them. Storms sprung up seemingly out of nowhere to fling sand and silt into their vision. Fissures in the ground opened up dark caverns and fiery rifts right under their feet. It took all of the famous Astartes agility, speed and sheer shortness of reaction-times for them to survive.

The sky was streaked with lines of red and black and pink and purple, crawling and widening, like cracks in the foundations of the universe. There was a sense of destiny, of horrible inevitability lurking in miasma, though his Astartes helmet's readings assured him that the chemical composition of the air was fine.

It felt like he had stepped out onto a cliff edge above a gaping bottomless chasm and he could feel the gravel shifting and groaning as it struggled to hold his weight. Not a fall. Not yet. But the fall was there, and it was coming.

Yet Vergilius forged through, forged on, forged forward, leading the charge and fighting from the front. His brothers ran at his back. They trusted him; they looked up to him; they relied on him, their Brother-Captain, as a pillar of strength and pinnacle of what an Astartes should be. He could not fail them, and would not.

The Astartes ran on foot. Vergilius wished he had his trusty Rhino with him, but they had had to abandon their armoured personnel carriers many kilometres behind. The Mars-pattern Rhinos were good vehicles, rugged and reliable, decently armed, well-armoured, and faster than even a Space Marine could run. But they did not have the agility that a running and jumping Astartes had. They were not well suited to terrain where the very ground under their feet tore itself apart in rifts that sought to swallow them. They had lost a Rhino and half the crew of another to that—fifteen men of the company, brave men, the Emperor's men, dead for naught in Tenebris IV's shifting earth—before Vergilius himself had given the order to leave the vehicles behind.

They fought their way through an innumerable bestiary of horrors. Hordes of shambling creatures with swollen bellies, surrounded by clouds of flies, slow to walk but absurdly hard to kill; vicious eight-legged wolves with red eyes that seemed to delight in slaughter, foaming at the mouth, snarling with bloodlust and hate; snakelike things that would leap up from the ground to bite at their ankles or seem to materialise out of nothing from strange gaps in the air; the man-eaters they had fought before, the flying beasts that were part-spider, part-monkey, part-bird; great oozing slugs that sought to crush them under their stinking corpulence; huge tall horn-crowned things that held axes and bellowed for blood and rage… the Astartes fought them all, with crack of bolts and whir of chainswords.

Vergilius Masimus was no green recruit. He had been one of the first men and women in the Space Marine Legions—the founding few thousand men who had sworn their lives to the Emperor on Terra in the Unification Wars' dying days. He had fought for the Emperor since he was Emperor of Terra only, before there even was an Imperium of Man. And this was one of the most difficult battles he had ever fought.

Days ago, the Legion had sent word urgently to the Emperor's Light, seeking the ear of Aurora Starchild to request reinforcements as soon as she could spare. She was, after all, in command in the Perseus Arm campaign. But a galactic spiral arm was a big place, and not even she could be everywhere at once. Right now the Lady of the Dawn was thirteen-thousand light-years away, battling far-off foes on a far-off planet: a legion of self-assembling metal serpents, Abominable Intelligences, if the rumours had any truth in them. Besides, Astropathic messages were notoriously unreliable. Some chance ripple of a current in the Warp could have strangled the dream twisting through the aether which was their only chance of salvation.

So they could not count on salvation. No-one was coming to save them. They would have to save themselves.

They were alone.

The monsters predominated now. Earlier in the battle, there had been more of the foes they had fought before the galaxy went mad: the human soldiers of the mystery cult. They had been easy foes: well-armed by most standards, comparable to the Imperial Army, for Tenebris IV was a Civilised World of technological heights alike to the Imperium's, but no match for the fury of the Emperor's Space Marines. There were fewer and fewer of them, though. The monsters were another matter, especially upon such treacherous terrain. The ground beneath people's feet failed them with such regularity and rapidity that it was almost as if the world itself was hostile to Man, influenced by some enemy mind. But that could not be true. That was madness.

Slowly, under the swirling purple-streaked sky, the volcanic landscape gave way to a different kind of vision of apocalypse: a ruined city, full of collapsed masonry, broken foundations poking jaggedly out of the ground. Vergilius and his men moved through difficult terrain with pace and without hesitation, scaling boulders, leaping ravines, seizing strongpoints and always moving with coordination and readiness for a fight.

It was well that they were. Something small dropped in the midst of them, almost inaudible against the shriek of the dying planet. Someone shouted "Grenade!" And the men flung themselves away, just as a sphere of pure black erupted from the centre of where they had just been. Whatever it was, it was no combustion. That was no fire. For a moment there was perfect darkness. Next, everything that had been within eight metres of where the grenade had been was gone. Not damaged, not melted, not torn, not even vaporised. There was no telltale smell of smoke, nor heat-scarring on what was left behind. One ruined house had half of it missing. At the join, the wall started and then just stopped, somehow. The lines in the rockcrete were smooth and untouched by heat or stress. It was as if part of the wall did not know that the other half had disappeared. Everything in that sphere was entirely gone, as if someone had deleted a section of the universe.

This was getting out of hand. What foul bargains had the enemy struck, and what forces had they struck them with? Whatever malevolent technologies these Tenebrians had, Vergilius did not think they were of human making.

The foes that had thrown the grenade came charging around a corner, hoping to mop up the doubtless terrified and daunted survivors. Fortunately they were not near as formidable as their armament. It was a battalion of human cultists. They were young men—some achingly young, as young as thirteen—brandishing autoguns and ecstatically chanting hymns of hate. Their wide eyes and foamy mouths testified to the inherent insanity of god-worship.

The god-worshippers seemed shocked that these men in sky-blue armour were not dead already, or else so paralysed with fear they might as well have been dead. But the Emperor's Space Marines had met nasty surprises before. Was it not said that they knew no fear?

The Astartes mowed them down with ruthless efficiency, spreading out and systematically taking them apart with fusillades of bolter fire. It took less than twenty seconds before the battalion started to flee. By then, of course, it was too late. Well-aimed bolts took care of the last few survivors, and the field belonged to the Imperium.

Vergilius and his men went onward.

More than a few times, they met people on the way. It was amazing testament to the courage, endurance and ingenuity of the human species that they could survive even in a place as forsaken as this. Brother-Captain Vergilius Masimus and his company sheltered them as best they could, fighting off cultists and monsters.

Men and women rushed without hesitation to hide their children behind the armoured bulk of the big men in blue. The god-worshippers have shown their true faces, Vergilius thought. When he thought about it, it was quite extraordinary. The priest-lords of the theocratic cult had been these people's government, not long ago, and yet they trusted foreigners—the soldiers of the Imperium—with their children's lives sooner than they trusted those who had once ruled them.

There were many people in dire need of food, water and healing. Vergilius's company gave them a little, but not half as much as they should. Vergilius wished he could stay here and aid them for longer. They were humans, after all. Did not the Great Crusade exist in the first place for their sake, for their uplift and protection? But he and his Astartes had to go on, as much as his heart ached for them. Duty must be done. In the Emperor's name, they had to end this nightmare, not just endure it.

Other companies of the Legion joined them as they came, and no wonder, for they all were heading to the same place. It was the place where the readings were strongest, the source of the bizarre seismic and atmospheric distortion that Tenebris IV knew.

A community centre, the Tenebrian leadership had called it during negotiations. A historic building, they said, and dismissed it as of no importance.

Looking upon it now, Vergilius would sooner call it a temple. A dark and dreary place, built to revere the tyrannical hold of superstition on the children of Man.

The closer they got to the temple, the worse the world had got. The fissures in the ground grew ever-greater, more treacherous and more numerous. Metre-thick ravines opened up out of nowhere, half a second after one another. Any man who was not an Astartes would surely have died. Even Astartes struggled. Of the thousands winding their way towards the temple, more than a few met inglorious death in the cold ground. The sky was not so obviously harmful, but it was wrong. The stars and even streetlamps overhead twisted, distorted, turned, smeared and danced around, as if the geometry of the universe was being warped in a mirror.

Then, suddenly, as soon as they stepped close enough, it stopped. Order was restored. The pillars of the temple were untouched. The floor—black basalt paved with lines of obsidian and red granite—was undisturbed in its pattern, darkly gleaming. It was as if whatever power meddled with the world outside did not dare to touch reality in here… or did not wish to.

That did not make Vergilius feel any better. The sense of pressure in the air had not gone away. On the contrary, it had only got stronger. It loomed over them, something huge and powerful and wrong, bone-deeply wrong. Something was breaking, or about to break—a storm that would sweep across the world and nothing would ever be the same again.

A voice rang out, a deep bass booming with command. It gladdened Vergilius's heart and lightened his spirits. No wonder; for it was the booming voice of Gaius Valimens, the Legion Master, and—not coincidentally—its greatest hero and warrior.

"To me, my brothers!" Valimens cried. "Rally 'round me! One hard thrust and let us end this vile cult, tear down their church and bring relief to the suffering planet!"

A ragged cheer issued forth from the battered, tired men. Days of intense fighting had taken their toll. But it was hard not to feel like a hero when Gaius Valimens strode among them. The leader of the Legion was a giant among men, even Space Marines, standing two and three fifths metres high. His shining armour was a sunny, summer-sky shade of blue, and the Power Sword thrumming in his fist had slain many foes of the Imperium.

Under Valimens's commands, the men burst in through the blackened bronze gate and fanned out through the temple.

On the inside, an ugliness was revealed that from the outside could not be seen. Grotesque statues were everywhere, carved with perversely loving detail into representations of hideous beasts, reminiscent of the dark and twisted things that they had fought outside. Altars were heaped with gore and stank of blood, bone and viscera.

No wonder the mystery cult of Tenebris IV had kept its people locked out of these doors. The Tenebrians would have revolted if they had the faintest inkling of what kind of people really ruled them.

Vergilius's company passed through a warren of dark and winding corridors. They spent more time in there than they cared to remember. At least twice, Vergilius would have felt sure he was retracing his steps, were it not for his helmet's tracking telling him otherwise. Were these passages deliberately made an impassable maze to confuse and deter intruders?

Then it ended abruptly with another blackened bronze gate, emblazoned with an eight-pointed star. The Imperials paused and looked at their Brother-Captain. Vergilius gave a quick nod. Half a second later, a blast of a plasma cannon blasted it to ruin. The Astartes looked out, into…

…a charnel pit. It had been a great arena, once, an amphitheatre which could have seated millions of men. Now it seated millions of corpses. Men's corpses, women's corpses, children's corpses… all sat rotting on the seats, gazing down at the central stage. It was a macabre festival celebrating the desecration of the dead.

And in that centre, on that circular stage—no, not circular; was it octagonal?—was an altar of obsidian, red sandstone and gold. An old woman stood there, frail, bent of back and white of hair. She did not look scared. She looked calm, serene, and friendly, with a kind-looking face, like somebody's doting grandmother.

She held in her left hand a bloody obsidian knife. Her arms were caked with blood up to the elbows.

A screaming man of middle age was dragged to her by a pair of fanatics, gaunt and stoic men whose eyes gleamed when the old woman thanked them. He wore a black suit and square-framed glasses. He was pleading for his life.

"No, please, please, Your Worship, please don't kill me, I didn't do anything, I didn't sin, please don't—"

The obsidian knife slashed across his throat. His neck collapsed like a chicken's. Blood soaked the already drenched altar, adding to the lake of red around its splendid sandstone feet. The fanatics dragged the corpse away, while more of them brought in the next victim.

Vergilius and his men had entered most of a kilometre away from the nearest other humans. They were not easily seen. There were only perhaps twenty-thousand fanatics in the room—a great number, but seeming tiny in the immense space of the cavernous amphitheatre, which was the largest man-made structure Vergilius had ever seen, short of the Imperial Palace.

Vergilius noticed with horror that many of the dead men seated in the stalls in the lowest rows, closest to the arena, were wearing the same uniforms as the cultist fanatics. Those corpses were actually smiling, as if they were happy to have died. God-worship, he thought, disgusted. Never sufficiently accursed.

Yet somehow the old woman's cataract-filled eyes swung over to stare straight at them. She smiled. "Aha," she said. "Gentlemen, we have guests."

At those words, fire and steel erupted across the chamber. The Astartes, knowing they were spotted, did not waste time. They surged out of the ruined gate with cries of "For the Emperor! Feel his might!" and "Death to the god-worshippers!" The cultists of Tenebris IV retorted with their own screaming cries, honouring whatever foul and profane deities they believed in. Vergilius did not know and did not care to ask.

The Astartes were outnumbered hundreds to one; but they were Astartes, and they were more than lesser men. The elite soldiers of the mystery cult of Tenebris IV were well-armed. Near every one of them had a Power Field weapon of some sort: Power Axes, Power Spears, Power Swords. Many had those strange grenades which carved black spheres of nothingness out of the universe, or other exotic weaponry. But they did not have the same blistering speed, strength, initiative and unity of purpose as the Emperor's Space Marine Legions. Besides, the advantage of numbers soon began to diminish. Vergilius and his company were not the only Space Marines here, after all, merely the first to arrive. Others joined them. They gladly took the assistance of their battle-brothers in the fight at hand.

Before long, a short and intense firefight saw the cultists slain and Space Marines in sky-blue armour closing in on the central arena. Around them, the rows of the millions of the dead gazed down as silent spectators. Perhaps they would get to see themselves be avenged.

At the altar, at the very centre of the octagonal arena, the white-haired grandmotherly woman stood. In her arms, she held the last hostage: a little boy, no more than five years old, blond-haired, tearful-eyed, wriggling and struggling. Her hand was locked around his throat. He could not move. He could hardly breathe.

Desperately the Astartes strove to reach her, more importantly to reach him. But the last rows of the soldier cultists stood firm, still. Even when their priestess had calmly slit their comrades' throats, nothing had made them relent. They fought with dumb, unquestioning dedication to their dreadful duty. And the black-sphere unreality grenades in their hands were dangerous enough that the Astartes could not rush them. To be too many men up close was to die without achieving anything.

The last lines of fanatics stood between the priestess and her victim and his would-be rescuers. The would-be rescuers could do naught but look on, helplessly, and try to cut down the cultists a little bit faster.

The young boy's struggles were growing weaker. He gasped for breath. He could not bring much strength to his arms when the woman's wiry arm was tight around his throat. Still he kept struggling.

The white-haired old woman smiled and stroked his hair with her other arm. In another context, it would have looked grandmotherly. Here, it looked obscene.

Wading in the red lake she had spilt, she forced the child's head down onto the cold stone of the altar.

"It will be over soon, little one," she crooned. "It will all be over very, very soon. Just one more sacrifice."

The knife moved in her hand—

—BANG!

—and clattered to the floor. Two huge armoured feet slammed down on the bloody ground. It was Gaius Valimens, soaring through the sky with a jump-pack. He was here. The Legion Master was here, and more than a thousand other Space Marines behind him.

The woman howled. The bolt had gone straight through her hand—a perfect shot, fired while moving at a hundred metres per second, aiming for a moving target. Indeed, the priestess's hand no longer existed. Nor did most of her right arm. And shards of shrapnel had dug deep into her chest and belly.

The priestess collapsed onto the cold stone, her blood mixing with the lake of the blood of innocents. The little boy sprang to his feet. He ran for his life. Desperation lent him strength. He headed for the Astartes, who with their reinforcements had made short work of finishing off the remaining cultists. He dived behind a Space Marine's thick, tree-trunk-like leg. Then, exhausted, spent, he lay there, breathing heavily. The Astartes of the Legion instinctively moved around him, covering him.

Gaius Valimens strode up to the cultist-queen of Tenebris IV, a giant figure, tall and strong in shining sky-blue armour. His Power Sword was lifted and pointing straight at her throat. She could not move, lest she be run through. He looked like an avenging angel of a primitive faith, descended from heaven to render judgement on the unrighteous.

"This ends here, god-worshipper scum," Valimens declared. "You have lost."

Queerly, through cracked and bloodied lips, the old woman was smiling.

"You should have gone for the head," she croaked—then threw herself at the man holding a blade to her neck. Valimens's Power Sword went through the soft flesh of her throat easily, with scarcely any resistance. Blood gushed everywhere.

A drop of that blood landed on the altar.

With horror Vergilius Masimus remembered the woman's own words:

It will be over soon.

One more sacrifice.