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The attack had been well coordinated, timed to perfection. The first drop-troopers had landed just as the line of tanks had emerged from the cloud wall and just after a scything attack run by air that had cost him many warriors and war machines of the dark gods.

It was a well-organised attack, but one that was ultimately flawed. Given an inordinate amount of time, the enemy would prevail, for their numbers were great, but time was not on the Imperials' side. Even he, Kol Badar, who felt the touch of the dark gods only faintly, could feel the birth tremors of the Gehemehnet. He knew that the enemy would feel it too. They would be fearful and rightly so.

In the meantime, the enemy would die upon his warriors' blades.

The haemonculus attached to Techno-Magos Darioq via aqueduct cables flooded his system with suppressants and holy vital fluids, filtering his veins and cables for viruses. Red robes hid the tumorous, cancer-ridden flesh of the stunted creature that had been bred in the nutrient tanks of Mars. It diverted the diseases and weaknesses of the flesh into itself so that they did not afflict him; such was its purpose in life.

He quoted the fifteenth Universal Lore to himself, ''Flesh is fallible, but ritual honours the machine-spirit'', and he intoned a prayer to the Omnissiah as his system was cleansed.

Nevertheless, he recognised something amiss within the frail remnants of his flesh body and he opened up the cortex channels to the right-hand side of his brain in order to determine its purpose. Synapses sparked and he realised that what he felt were crude and fleshy emotions: tension, trepidation and anger.

Such base, human things, emotions, yet he found them intriguing as well as deplorable.

It had been a long time since last he had stepped foot upon planet c6.7.32, what the Elysians called Tanakreg. He accessed the hard memories of his secondary brain units and one of the myriad arrays of screens within the control centre of his airship flashed with data.

It showed his report to the Fabricator Tianamek Primus, dated over two thousand years earlier, though his current brain units had no record of him having scribed them.

Access to primary expeditionary focus/purpose denied. Magos Metallurgicus Annonus unable to determine material make-up of structure. Impervious. Logis cogitator augurs recommended path - terraform c6.7.32 and dissemble discovery. Magos Technicus Darioq to fabricate auditory station, and post watch over c6.7.32.

That was the source of the alien emotions of tension and trepidation that he had felt in the past two millennia. None had sought out that which he had been unable to breach, yet here was a powerful enemy of the Omnissiah on c6.7.32. It was imperative that they did not uncover the structure that he had gone to such pains to eradicate from all Imperial and accessible Mechanicus records.

But anger had nothing to do with the exploratory expedition he had led. That strange, hot temper had been brought upon him by the nature of the foe. He could feel the affront to the Machine-God in their essence, in the unholy constructions that they had defiled beyond all heresies.

Their machines, infused with the essence of daemonic warp entities, were the greatest corruption that the adepts of Mars could contemplate, a blasphemy that made all other blasphemies pale. All thinking machineries of the Mechanicus had souls within their flesh, for a soulless sentient machine is the epitome of true evil. And upon the battlefield, raging beyond the concealing clouds of blind-smoke, were machineries that had been polluted by their merging with the soulless entities of the warp. A soulless sentience is the enemy of all.

Such heresies were utterly wrong and Darioq was both revolted and horrified by how low the Legion of the Word Bearers had stooped. He shut off the receptors and synapses that synched his right brain hemisphere and the uncomfortable feelings instantly vanished. All that remained was the irrefutable fact that the enemy made use of sacrilegious, dangerous machineries that were an affront to his god and that they needed to be neutralised, their heresies eradicated and their hold over c6.7.32 removed.

His mechadendrites plugged into the central control column and, connected as he was to the delicate sensors on the outside of the hull, he registered the field of disruption that spread out in a cone from the enemy's tower. At his impulse, the command ship was lowered towards the ground. It was imperative for him to maintain contact and hence control over his thousands of Skitarii warriors. If he were cut off from them and his adepts then his entire army would grind to a halt.