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"Calling Beta Squad. Sael, report your current position. Transmission ends."
A burst of static cracked through the vox-link, sharp enough to make the comms officer flinch. Then came the reply, clipped, controlled, and deliberately stripped of emotion.
"This is Beta Squad. We are currently located in Sector 19 of the southern New Kato military encampment, seventeen kilometers from the extraction point. Awaiting further orders."
Deep within the underhive, where no natural sun had shone for centuries and even the recycled air carried the taste of rust, ozone, oil, and slow human decay, Beta Squad continued its advance.
Calling them a squad was a joke only an Administratum clerk could have written with a straight face. Beta Squad was nearly a thousand strong, a moving warband stitched together from hive gangers, contract killers, deserters, professional kidnappers, hired blades, and itinerant freeblades whose loyalty had been bought, threatened, blackmailed, or beaten into usefulness.
Yet the rabble did not move like rabble.
Across the corroded industrial plains beneath Tyrone Hive, they advanced in staggered combat formation. Men carrying heavy bolters, plasma rifles, long-las rifles, and scavenged volkite weapons held the forward edge, rear guard, and flanks.
Others moved between them with hellguns, grenade launchers, demolition packs, and field vox-units wrapped in rags to muffle stray noise. A few even wore powered armor, not the blessed relic-plate of true Imperial elites, but repaired underhive exo-suits built from stolen military stock, mining frames, and machine-shop desperation.
It was ugly equipment, but it worked.
The vanguard knew what it meant to walk first. The rear guard knew what it meant to lag behind. If an ambush came, they were expected to die slowly enough for the center to keep moving. No one had said it aloud before the mission began. No one needed to. Every experienced killer in the formation understood the arithmetic.
This mission was suicide.
No one expected to leave Talon I alive. Most had accepted that before they crossed the first sealed bulkhead into the lower zones. As long as two operatives reached extraction with the package, the dead would be counted as useful rather than wasted. In the Imperium, that was the closest most men came to dignity.
"Status of the target?"
A man near the center of the formation glanced toward the covered stretcher being carried between four armored operatives. Beneath the restraint webbing, the abducted soldier remained motionless, his breath measured by a small medicae auspex strapped against his throat.
"Unconscious. Vital signs remain stable."
"Good. Proceed with the mission."
Beta Squad pressed forward.
They had not yet encountered resistance, and that worried Sael more than gunfire would have. Empty terrain in the underhive was rarely empty. Silence usually meant someone was watching, something had already passed through, or the place itself had become too toxic, unstable, or cursed for even underhive scum to inhabit.
His operatives searched everything. Weapons tracked broken catwalks, collapsed transit gantries, open pipe mouths, slag ridges, and the black gaps between dead manufactorum shells. Targeters swept the darkness. Auspex units clicked and muttered unreliable readings through layers of old interference. The men kept their spacing wide enough to avoid a single blast, close enough to prevent the formation from dissolving into the maze.
Unlike many Imperial hive worlds, Tyrone had not grown from habitation alone. Its bones were industrial. Ancient mega-factories formed the roots of the hive, and the city had been built upward and around them until the original structures vanished beneath layers of habitation, command spires, manufactoria, and forgotten infrastructure.
Looking up, Sael could not see a ceiling. He saw only stacked darkness, rusted gantries, hanging pipe bundles, and industrial voids that seemed to climb forever. Catwalks drooped overhead like dead vines. Service rails vanished into black shafts large enough to swallow armored columns.
Looking down was no better. The ground beneath them was a metal wasteland of slag heaps, buried conveyor lines, flooded machine pits, broken assembly frames, and engines that had outlived the men, dynasties, and wars that once gave them purpose.
For those born in these depths, this was not the underside of a world. It was the world. The Emperor's light existed only in sermons, ration-stamps, and the lies of men who had seen the surface and returned with guns.
"We're moving too slowly." Sael walked beside the comms officer, one hand resting near the hilt of his power sword while he leaned toward the vox-caster mounted on the soldier's back. "If we had transports, we would be at extraction already."
The answer came at once, harsh enough to cut through the static.
"Are you out of your mind? Do you know how much effort it took just to get you infiltrated?"
Sael's jaw tightened, then relaxed by force of will. He knew better than to argue with the man on the other end of the signal.
"My apologies, Lord Inquisitor. I spoke carelessly."
No answer came. Only the cold hiss of the vox.
Sael straightened and gestured for the column to keep moving. Beta Squad had to maintain constant communication. That was part of the arrangement. Regular position updates, target status reports, enemy contact notices, route confirmations. The Lord Inquisitor wanted a living thread leading through the underhive until the package reached extraction, and Sael had been given no authority to object.
After another half-cycle beneath the hive's dim artificial suns, Sael made the next scheduled report.
"No enemy contact. Terrain remains quiet. Continuing advance."
"Continue advancing."
"Understood."
He should have ended the transmission there. He knew that. But the question had been gnawing at him since the moment the operation began, growing heavier with every kilometer. He could ignore fear, exhaustion, and the stink of the underhive. He could ignore death. He had done that often enough.
He could not ignore doubt about who was truly holding the leash.
Sael hesitated, then spoke carefully.
"Lord Inquisitor, was this operation planned solely by you, or were others involved?"
The comms officer beside him went rigid. Several nearby operatives heard the question and pretended not to.
To most of Beta Squad, the answer did not matter. Coin was coin. A kill was a kill. An order backed by enough threat and reward became indistinguishable from law.
But to Sael, it mattered.
If this mission served the Imperium, then his death might still purchase something larger than another noble's convenience. If it served only the will of one Inquisitor, then Beta Squad was not a weapon of the Throne. It was a knife in a private hand.
The vox hissed.
"Continue your mission." The answer was colder than refusal. Then came the rest. "Your failures led to the tragedy at Orphus. You should have been executed long ago. Consider this your chance for atonement, vermin."
Sael's fingers curled into fists. For one moment his face twisted, rage breaking through the discipline he wore like armor. The men nearest him looked away. They knew that expression. They had seen it on commanders before executions, duelists before bloodshed, and condemned men before the final door opened.
When Sael answered, his voice came through clenched teeth.
"Fortunes of war, Lord Inquisitor. Nothing more."
Silence followed.
The vox-link died.
Sael exhaled through his nose, slow and sharp, and forced his hand away from his sword. Orphus was not here. The dead of Orphus were not here. The Inquisitor was not here either, which was probably the only reason Sael was still alive.
He had a mission to complete.
Beta Squad advanced toward the designated extraction point, moving deeper into the underhive's labyrinthine sprawl. The metallic plains eventually narrowed, the slag fields rising on both sides until the formation entered a steel gorge: a channel so vast it resembled a natural canyon, though every surface bore the mark of industry.
Old foundry walls towered above them. Rust-streaked drainage slots opened like wounds along the sides. Far overhead, broken cranes hung motionless from rails thick with grime. Beneath their boots, the ground sloped downward into a dry slag channel wide enough for tanks to pass abreast.
It was an excellent place to kill an army.
Sael knew it. His scouts knew it. Everyone knew it.
There was no better route.
Then light flooded the darkness.
A floodlight blazed overhead, white and merciless, turning the gorge into a killing ground. Shadows vanished. Men cursed and raised arms against the glare. Auto-senses overloaded. Targeting lenses dimmed and recalibrated.
Instinct honed by a lifetime of violence took over. The formation snapped into readiness. Bolters swung upward. Lasrifles tracked the source of the light. Plasma coils whined as gunners thumbed their weapons hot. Men at the flanks dropped to one knee behind broken slag ridges, while the center tightened protectively around the unconscious target.
Sael looked up and found the source.
A gunship hovered above them.
It should have been impossible to miss. Even a small aircraft should have shaken the gorge with downdraft, engine noise, and auspex presence. This machine had arrived like a shadow. It hung in the air with predatory stillness, its hull dark against the floodlight glare, weapon mounts already angled down.
Advanced stealth systems, Sael thought. Not PDF stock. Not local.
His gaze dropped.
Two figures had appeared at either end of the gorge. One stood ahead of Beta Squad. One stood behind them. Both were backlit by the gunship's glare, their silhouettes broad, armored, and unnaturally still.
Then the floodlights dimmed just enough for detail to return.
They wore power armor.
Not scavenged exo-suits. Not underhive repair-frame armor. Not noble dueling plate polished for parade grounds. This was true battleplate, human-sized but far beyond anything Sael's men possessed. Each suit was built with dense layered armor, integrated weapon mounts, sealed joints, and the unmistakable posture of machines designed around war rather than ceremony. Their pauldrons bore insignias Sael did not recognize, and that ignorance made him colder than recognition would have.
His mind raced back to the intelligence files the Inquisitor had shown him a year ago. Grainy pict-captures. Interrogation summaries. Fragmentary battlefield reports dismissed by some as exaggeration and treated by others like the beginning of a nightmare.
Thunderborn-pattern power armor.
Sael's mouth went dry.
....
At the forward end of the gorge, Grey observed the intruders through his helm display.
The hostile formation was large, irregular, and better equipped than most underhive forces had any right to be. Their weapons were mismatched, but the deployment was disciplined. Heavy weapons covered the arcs properly. The center was protected. Scouts had been absorbed back into the line before the illumination trap triggered. Whoever led them was no fool.
That did not matter.
They had trespassed. They had murdered soldiers of the 182nd Regiment. They had abducted one of Qin Mo's men. Grey had come to end the matter.
He stepped forward. The servos in his armor answered with a low growl. His voice boomed through the external vox-amplifier, filling the gorge with hard, metallic authority.
"The 182nd Regiment's scouting patrol. Seven recruits in total."
The enemy line shifted. Grey saw confusion first, then recognition beginning to spread in small movements: a head turning too quickly, a weapon dipping, a man glancing toward the covered stretcher.
Grey continued.
"Muir. Age twenty-three. Sato. Age twenty-four."
He listed the names one by one. Seven names. Seven ages. Seven men who had been sent on a scouting patrol and had instead become evidence.
The reaction was immediate. Shock moved through Beta Squad's ranks despite their discipline. Some men looked toward Sael. Others looked toward the unconscious prisoner. A few tightened their grips on their weapons, not from courage, but from the desperate need to have something in their hands when judgment arrived.
Grey allowed the silence to stretch for a single breath.
Then he delivered the sentence.
"According to my intelligence, six of these recruits were killed. One was abducted."
His stance shifted slightly. The shoulder-mounted weapon on his armor tracked the center of Beta Squad with quiet precision.
"By decree of Talon's Lord-Governor, you are guilty of murder, abduction, and treachery. The sentence is death."
Sael felt no fear.
That surprised even him.
There was anger, certainly. Irritation. Grim calculation. But not fear. Fear belonged to men who still believed survival was on the table. Sael had abandoned that illusion before the mission began.
What he felt instead was curiosity sharpened into alarm.
The mission had been simple in its brutality. Infiltrate the underhive. Locate the patrol. Kill the escorts. Abduct the designated soldier. Reach extraction. They had done exactly that. Six recruits were dead because the plan required their deaths. The seventh was unconscious because the Inquisitor wanted him alive.
Sael felt no guilt.
He had killed better men for worse reasons.
What troubled him was how quickly Talon's forces had found them. The abduction had been clean. The bodies had been left far from the direct route. Their movement had avoided known patrol paths, vox relays, and active drone corridors. By any normal standard, they should have had hours before pursuit organized.
Instead, Thunderborn had intercepted them seventeen kilometers from extraction.
The Talon system was full of mysteries. Qin Mo's rise. The impossible machines. The army that had crawled out of the underhive stronger than when it had been buried. The rumors of teleportation, gravity shields, and weapons that made Mechanicus dogma look like superstition scrawled on parchment.
This was only one more mystery.
Sael had no time to solve it.
He drew his power sword. Its edge ignited with caged lightning, blue-white arcs crawling along the blade and snapping against the polluted air.
"Prepare for battle!" Sael roared. His voice carried through the gorge, cutting through the hum of armor systems and the frightened shifting of his own men. "Follow the plan!"
The command steadied them. Not completely, but enough. Heavy weapons lowered. Plasma coils brightened. Hellguns found targets. Men in scavenged powered armor stepped forward to form a shield around the stretcher. Others began angling toward the gorge walls, already preparing to scatter, flank, or die buying seconds.
Grey saw it all and raised his weapon.
Behind Beta Squad, the second Thunderborn moved to seal the retreat. Above them, the gunship's weapon mounts rotated with soft mechanical clicks.
For one suspended moment, every man in the gorge understood exactly what came next.
The underhive was about to be bathed in blood.
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