Nick Kyme - Salamander

Fugis looked impassive at the Techmarine's clipped and precise reply.

'Then let us hope something does change so we might avert our fate,' he said.

Fugis was not certain he believed in fate or destiny. As an Apothecary he was practical, putting his faith in his hands and what he saw with his eyes. These few days upon the doomed world of Scoria had changed that. He had felt it most strongly in the ruined bridge of the old Expeditionary ship, where Gravius had sat like a recumbent corpse. By the laws of nature, the ancient Salamander should not still be alive. As Fugis had approached him, a sense of awe and reverence slowing his steps, Gravius was nearing the end of his endurance. It seemed he had held on for millennia, waiting for the return of his brothers.

Fugis didn't know what the significance of this discovery was. He was following the orders of his captain, but experienced a peculiar sense of woe and gravitas as he'd administered the Emperor's Peace through a nerve-serum injection. It was almost like defilement as he cracked open the ancient armour and retrieved the ancient's progenoids. In them was the genetic coding of the Legion, undistilled by time or generations of forebears. The experience was genuinely humbling and called to his fractured spirit.

'Brother Agatone and I are returning to the iron fortress,' he told Argos. The sergeant and his combat squad had accompanied Illiad in the Rhino APC. Agatone had waited outside the bridge when Fugis had gone to meet Gravius. Right now, he and his troopers were directing the evacuation of the settlers, those who had fought against the orks included - N'keln had decided no more human life would be lost to the greenskins if it could be avoided. All would return to the Vulkan's Wrath in the hope that the ship be made void-worthy again and deliver them to salvation.

Fugis and Agatone, leaving the combat squad to protect the settlers and escort them to the ship, would head back and support their battle-brothers if they could. For the moment, the orks had not attacked the crash-site, nor showed any signs of interest in it. That was just was well - there were only auxiliaries to defend it now.

'Sensors indicate the greenskins have already made landfall, brother. You will arrive too late to reach the battle lines, unless you plan on killing your way through a sea of orks,' Argos replied. Remarkably, there was no sarcasm in his tone.

'We'll take the tunnels, track our route through them to emerge next to the fortress walls.'

'Then you had best be going,' said Argos, before returning to the gloom of the conduit. 'Time is short for all of us now, brother.'

Fugis turned his back on him as he left the enginarium. The Apothecary wondered if it would be the last time.

T he sounds of the battle above drifted down to the catacombs of the inner keep like muffled thunder. The orks had brought their war host and were now fighting the Salamanders tooth and claw across the blood-strewn ash dunes.

Chaplain Elysius had dismissed the flamer bearers, though the acrid reek of spent promethium still remained. The troopers would be better employed above against the greenskin horde than here amongst the dark and the whispers.

An itch was developing at the back of the Chaplain's skull. He felt it lightly at first, muttering litanies under his breath as he watched Draedius go to work on the seismic cannon, trying to cleanse and purify its machine-spirits - the Techmarine would need to visit the reclusium after this duty, so that Elysius could appraise his sprit and ensure it wasn't tainted. The itch had grown to a nagging insistence, a raft of sibilant whispers, drifting in and out of focus, pitched just at the edge of his mind. The Chaplain was steeled against it. The dark forces slaved to the iron fortress's walls, were trying to breach his defences but the purifying fire had weakened them for now and his sermons were keeping them in check.

Draedius, standing before the cannon, performed his own rituals. Restoration of the weapon's machine-spirit would not be easy, though it was a necessary task. Without it the cannon would not fire; it might even malfunction with dire consequences. The only small mercy was that the weapon was not already daemon-possessed.

It rankled with Elysius that they had been forced into employing the weapons of the enemy. It smacked of compromise and deviancy. Though devout, the Chaplain was no fool either. The cannon was the only means of destroying the black rock and halting the near-endless orkish tide. The rational part of his brain did wonder why the Iron Warriors would construct such a weapon. Its purpose here on Scoria seemed narrow and limited. He felt as if he were looking at it through a muddied lens, the edges caked in grime. His view was myopic, but instinct had taught Elysius to perceive with more than just his eyes. There was something lurking within that grimy frame, just beyond sight; only by seeing that would the full truth of the Iron Warriors' 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.