We didn't need any sophisticated method to find our way to where Bahometus and the coven were at work. There was a wailing psychic wrongness in the air that screamed their location. Even the troopers, bereft of any mental gifts, could feel it, the hair on their necks prickling and standing on end. We passed more bodies as we advanced deeper into the xenos lair. Many were the metal men we had seen, their chrome bodies hacked and mutilated almost beyond recognition. The bodies of our own men were worse. We found them in ones and twos, their entrails ripped from their chests and strung around the walls like bunting, blood spattered everywhere. I was trying very hard to come up with a suggestion that we ought to pull back and let the navy sterilize the site from orbit, but I couldn’t find a way to do so that wouldn't make it sound like I thought running away was the right choice. Abruptly, the corridor opened into a vast plaza. The place must have been a mile square, completely composed of black stone veined with the unwholesome xenos green.  A large pyramid stood in the center, surmounted by a spinning point of sickly purple light. The pyramid had protrusions like skeletal arms that emitted an arcing greenish discharge around the light, as though containing or conjuring it. There were a dozen or more smaller pyramids surrounding the first, their points glowed green, and periodically bolts of green lightning snapped between the smaller and the larger structure. The air was ionized beyond belief, though not quite enough to block out the filthy stink of the warp that permeated the place. Great obelisks of silvery metal erupted from the ground around the central pyramids, rising nearly to the ceiling before sinking away again to no rhythm I could determine. Xenos glyphs glowed on their surfaces in green. Some remained up for minutes, others only a few seconds, before sinking into the floor leaving no sign they had ever been there. I felt stark terror at the sight. Who knew what this place had been designed for. We were like ants who were toying with the controls to a battle tighten in hopes it might flatten a few other ants.

 

“We have to reach the central pyramid,” Hadrian declared, as though that were simply a matter of marching over there.

 

“Commander,” Lucius said in a voice that was probably conversational for him but registered as a shout to the rest of us. We followed his out stretched bronze finger and saw dark red figures running towards us. There was no mistaking them as human. Each had six spindly arms tipped with razor sharp talons, the top two arms held swords that looked to be made of black and red stone that thrummed with malevolent energy. Their faces were beyond horrible, vaguely equine and eyeless save for where brass studs marked with hideous eye searing glyphs had been hammered.

 

“Throne preserve us,” one of the guardsmen muttered. I tried to share the sentiment but felt a welling of despair as I remembered Lucius’ mental images of the Emperor as a man, a great general to be sure, but just a man. There were a dozen of them, yipping and calling in what might have been language but what I preferred to think of as simple animal noises. Suddenly an obelisk erupted beneath the feet of the demon pack, throwing the bulk of them two hundred feet into the air. Daemonic they might have been, but they cracked like eggs when they hit the ground, oozing an oldly luminescent smoke. A pair that had been by the edge of the pack had merely been knocked off their feet. They scuttled forward like spiders, regaining their footing as they came.

 

“For the Emperor!” Hadrian shouted and the troopers opened fire. Laz bolts ripped through the air, their energy leaving lingering purple tracks in the ionized air. The lead daemon shuddered like a man hunching against the snow, las bolts blasting smoldering craters in its carapace. The second one, seemed to race past the first, like a drafting swan. It leaped into the air thirty feet from us both blades and four sets of talons raised to strike. I knew I was going to die. It was a certainty. If not from these two daemons then from the other packs I could already see heading towards us on sparking claws. An icy feeling settled into my stomach. Without really thinking about it, I lifted the force staff and pointed it at the leaping horror. My will exploded through the psycho-conductive alloy. This was no unfocused panicked strike like the one I had employed while escaping the ball. It was a hard lance of pure will, just like Hadrian had taught me. It caught the Daemon in mid air. The thing might have been inhumanly fast, it might have been impossibly strong, but so long as it wasn’t touching the ground, it was simply an object in motion. The blast caught it in the thorax and hammered it back like a juvie hitting a hive ball. It shrieked in rage for a brief moment before it hit the obelisk which had so fortuitously dispatched its companion. It wasn’t a clean strike, it hit the trapezoidal edge of the structure and flew off at an angle, its back shattered and trailing glowing warp smoke. Its companion continued to stagger forward, but the death of one of the things seemed to have lifted the fog of panic from our troopers. The panicked fire became accurate and placed, the whole front of the daemon glowed like metal that had been overheated. The thunder warrior stepped into the hail of las fire as though it wasn’t their and drove a great fist into the things glowing chest. It burst apart in a spray of ichor.

 

“Forward!” Hadrian screamed and strode towards the pyramid weapons raised.