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'I know that he is not, sir, but… I still don't know why we didn't just drop on Shinar and have this whole thing over with as soon as possible.'

'We do that and the entire damn regiment would be slaughtered. The air defences of Shinar are strong. Don't be thickheaded, Elias. Use your brains for a change and stop thinking with your damn balls!'

Elias grinned suddenly. 'I do have a big old pair of balls though, captain.'

'The sentinels on recon reported yet?'

'Another hour before the next report, sir.'

'Well, keep Colonel Boerl informed. If they see any enemy movement, report in immediately. We must secure those highlands. The brigadier-general says the enemy may be up there already. If that's the case, then without artillery support to make the bastards keep their heads down, we will be weathering the storm trying to land. If they are up there, it is not going to be easy to take it off them.'

'If anyone can take it off them, it'll be the 72nd,' said Elias, turning towards his superior. The captain was looking out across the plains to where the Adeptus Mechanicus battle force was making ready to move out.

'What do you make of them, sir?' asked Elias, indicating the massing Adeptus Mechanicus tech-guard with an incline of his head. Ever more of the disturbing warriors and war machines of Mars were disembarking from the wide-bodied Mechanicus loaders.

Captain Laron curled his lip in distaste. 'Never seen a concentration of them like this.'

The earth boomed as another of the massive cargo-transports of the Mechanicus landed, throwing up a cloud of salt grit. Hulking, slow moving, tracked crawler vehicles emerged from transports that had already landed, each led by a procession of censor waving, red-robed adepts of the Machine-God. From others came more of the pale fleshed tech-guard soldiers, marching in perfect, rectangular phalanx blocks, ten deep and a hundred wide.

Those phalanxes that had already disembarked were arrayed in their rigid formations, standing stone still on the salt plains, awaiting further instruction. Laron was certain that if no instruction came, they would stand unmoving, arrayed as they were until the cursed salt winds buried them. Even then, he supposed that the mindless things would be still, awaiting instruction.

From a distance, they might have been mistaken for regular Imperial Guard infantry platoons, though an observant onlooker would see that they were far too still to be completely human. They stood in serried ranks with lasguns held motionless over their chests, and many of their faces were all but obscured by deep visored helmets.

On closer inspection, many of the tech-guard soldiers looked less like Imperial Guardsmen and more like semi-mechanical servitors.

Servitors existed in every facet of Imperial life, fulfilling all manner of menial, dangerous tasks, but to see so many of them gathered together in one place for the sole purpose of war was highly disturbing to the Elysians. Servitors were neither truly alive nor truly dead. They had been human once, but all vestiges of that humanity had been long lost. Their frontal lobes had been surgically removed and their weak flesh improved upon with the addition of mechanics. These varied depending on the task that they were required to perform. They might have had their arms removed and replaced with power lifters or diamond-tipped drills the size of a man's leg to work in one of the millions of manufactorums across the Imperium, or be hard-wired into the logic engines of battle cruisers to maintain the ships' support functions.

The tech-guard soldiers arrayed upon the plains were created specifically for the arena of war. Amputated arms had been replaced with heavy weaponry, and targeting sensors and arrays filled the sockets where fleshy eyeballs had been plucked. Power generators were built onto the shoulders of some, and they stood immobile beside gun-servitors, cables and wiring trailing between the pair. Others had single, large servo-arms replacing one or more of their removed limbs, giving them an ungainly, limping gait as servos straggled under the weight. These mechanical arms were as easily capable of ripping a man's head from his shoulders as lifting heavy equipment, and some bore oversized rotary blades or power drills that could cut or punch through the heaviest of armour.

Amongst the phalanxes were smaller contingents of heavier, tracked servitor units. The lower bodies of these servitors had been removed so that they had become one with their means of conveyance. These bore heavier payloads of ammunition that spooled into the large, multiple barrelled cannons that replaced the organic right arms of the servitors.