dispersal field, burners flared and several of the massive drop-ships rose, swinging low above the hillside, shuddering the air and billowing up a storm of bracken fibres as they lifted almost impossibly into the cloudy sky.
Three kilometres distant, Gaunt could see through his scope two regiments of Mordian Iron Guard forming up as they advanced from their landing points. Another two kilometres beyond them, the Vitrian Dragoons were advancing from their first staging. The rolling hilly landscape was alive with troops, clusters of black dots marching up from the blasted acres of the dispersal site, forward through the scrub.
By mid-morning, the parallel-advancing regiments of Imperial Guard armour and infantry were pushing like fingers through the bracken and scree-marked slopes of the highlands. At the dispersal sites now left far behind, ships were still ferrying components of the vast assault down from orbit. Thruster-roar rolled like faraway thunder around the sleeve of hills.
They began to see the towers: forty-metre tall, irregular piles of jagged rock rising out of the bracken every five hundred metres or so. Gaunt quickly passed the news on to command, and heard similar reports on the vox-caster’s cross-channel traffic. There were lines of these towers all across the highland landscape. They looked like they had been piled from flat slabs, wide at the base, narrowing as they rose and then wider and flat again at the top. They were all crumbling, mossy, haphazard, and in places time had tumbled some of their number over in wide spreads of broken stone, half-hidden amidst the bracken.
Gaunt wasn’t sure if they were natural outcrops, their spacing and linear form seemed to suggest otherwise. He was disheartened as he remembered the singular lack of data on Epsilon that had been available at the orbital preparatory briefings.
‘Possibly a shrine world’ had been the best the Intelligence cadre had had to offer. ‘The surface of the planet is covered in inexplicable stone structures, arranged in lines that converge on the main areas of ruins – the targets Primaris, Secundus and Tertius.’
Gaunt sent Mkoll’s scouting platoon ahead, around the breast of the hill through a line of mouldering towers and into the valley beyond. He flipped out the data-slate which he had secreted in his storm-coat pocket for two days and consulted the crystal’s data.
Calling up Trooper Rafflan, he took the speaker-horn from the field-caster on his back and relayed further orders. His units would scout ahead and the Mordians, advancing in their wake, would lay behind until he signalled. It was now local noon.
Turning back to his men, Gaunt saw Major Rawne nearby, standing in a grim hunch, his lasgun hanging limply in his hands.
Gaunt had all but refused to allow Rawne to join them, but the hexathedral medics had pronounced him fit. He was a shadow of his former self since the torture by the Jantine and that mysterious robed monster which Larkin had shot. Gaunt missed the waspish, barbed attitude that had made Rawne a dangerous ally – and a good squad leader.
Feygor, his adjutant, was here too, his life owed to Dor-den. Feygor was a loose cannon now, an angry man with an axe to grind. He’d railed against the Jantine in the barracks and cursed that they were sharing this expedition. Gaunt feared what might happen if the Ghosts and the Jantine crossed on Epsilon, particularly without Rawne sharp enough to keep his adjutant in line.
What will happen will happen, Gaunt decided, hearing Fereyd’s counsel in his head. He checked his boltgun for luck and was about to turn and tell Milo to play up when the shivering notes of a march spilled from the chanters of the Tanith pipes and echoed across the curl of the valley.
They were here. Now they would do this.
Two
LORD GENERAL DRAVERE’S Command Leviathan, a vast armoured, trundling fortress the size of a small city, crawled forward across the loamy soil of the lowland slope overlooking one of the main dispersal sites for the Primaris target.
At its heart, Dravere swung around in his leather command g-hammock. He was in a good mood. Thanks to his urgent requests, Warmaster Macaroth had personally instructed him to the command of the Epsilon offensive. The fool! Here lay the secret which the freak-beast Heldane had told him of on Fortis Binary. The reward. The prize that would win him everything.
Dravere had spent two days reviewing the available data on Menazoid Epsilon before the drop. Little more than a moon compared to its vast partner Sigma, it was reckoned