intruders knew the numeric codes and slid them open manually. Once inside, they severed the power cables that veined the ceilings above. Vox‐channels, motion sensors and trip lasers were all disconnected. In one quick act, Sabtah’s proto‐fortress became vulnerable and isolated.
Even the phos‐lights dimmed to black.
But Sabtah heard it all.
He sat upright in his circadian cradle – a high‐backed throne of leather and iron.
Spindles of wire sprouted from the cradle and interfaced with the black carapace beneath Sabtah’s naked torso. He pretended to be in a drug‐induced comatose state. He was unarmoured, wearing nothing but a leather kilt. His chin rested against his chest and his eyes were closed. But in his mind, Sabtah was wide awake.
He kept his eyes closed even as he heard the soft click of his chamber door. In his mind’s eye, Sabtah drew a mental map of his vault. The vault was high‐ceilinged and circular, a silo of vast but empty proportions. Ringing the walls were racks of disused boarding pikes –
hundreds, perhaps thousands of spears, among them Adulasian harpoons, Cestun half‐and-halfs and even Persepian marlin‐pikes. Dusty and antiquated, the pikes huddled like clusters of old men, their shafts brittle and their tips toothless.
To his right, at the opposite end of the empty chamber, was his MKII power amour.
Erect on a dais, the suit watched the vault like an empty sentry. The only other object in the vault was a tiny necklace, a blackened, withered scrap of coarse hair and leather. It was suspended in a glass pillar, floating like a tribal fetish. Sabtah had worn it once when he had been a mere boy, thousands of years ago, in the darkest caves of his memory. Capturing the image behind his eyelids, Sabtah waited.
He allowed the intruders to step closer. He counted two, judging by their movements.
He heard the rasp of metal being unsheathed. It was a good draw, smooth and unhesitant.
He restrained his battle instinct and kept his eyes closed.
He heard the final whine of a blade as it cleared the scabbard, so soft it barely disturbed the cool, recycled air.
That was when Sabtah burst into life.
He leapt. His explosiveness was incredible, clearing four metres from a standstill. The spindle wires snapped painfully from his torso plugs but Sabtah didn’t feel them.
He seized the knife arm in the dark, wrenching it into a figure‐four lock and dislocating the elbow with a wet snap. He judged where the intruder’s throat would be in relation to 69
the arm and punched with his fingers, jamming his gnarled digits into the larynx. He was rewarded by a wheeze of pain.
Suddenly an arm seized Sabtah from behind, constricting around his throat. It snapped shut around his carotid arteries like a yoke. The arm was exceedingly strong and corded with smooth slabs of muscle. No normal man could possess such tendon strength; Sabtah knew he was fighting Astartes. It was something he had suspected when they first attacked, but now he was sure. Pivoting his hip, Sabtah tossed the assailant off his back with a smooth shoulder throw. The intruder crunched through his circadian cradle with a clash of sparks and broken circuitry.
Under the fitful, hissing glow of his wrecked sleeping capsule Sabtah caught a brief glimpse of his assassins. They were both Blood Gorgons, and Sabtah knew them well.
Both wore bodygloves of glossy umber; compression suits utilised for rigorous hand‐to-hand combat, strength and conditioning drills. Both were young, their faces lacking the mutations of warp‐wear. They were newly inducted warriors from Squad Mantica, a unit from the ruthless 5th Company.
‘Voldo, Korbaiden, desist!’ Sabtah ordered. His voice was sonorous, a blaring wall of sound.
The young warriors faltered, stiffening for a second. But their training, their clinical drive to complete a mission, overtook any fear they held for Sabtah’s seniority. They were here to kill Sabtah and they would finish the job.
As Voldo rose from the smoking wreck of the cradle, he lunged at Sabtah with a shard of broken panelling. Sabtah deflected the stab with the palm of his hand, a manoeuvre he had repeated millions of times in the drill halls. The younger warrior’s strike was slow in comparison, not yet honed through centuries upon centuries of combat. The trajectory was inefficient by ten degrees to the right and he did not roll his shoulder into the blow. Sabtah was faster and rammed his chin into Voldo’s eye. As Voldo reeled from the blow, Sabtah followed up with a rapid flurry of upper‐body strikes. An elbow that crunched the