I followed Hadrian and Ortega into the primary control chapel, keeping well behind the combatants. To my horror I realized that most of these poor folk were simply loyal Imperial subjects who had been misled by their corrupted masters. That wasn’t entirely true as I saw a handful of Haverni tribesmen cut down by three rapid coughs of Ortega’s weapon. He let the empty shotgun drop and snug up on its sling as he unshipped his powermaul and brought it crackling to life, driving the but off it into an onrushing zealot hard enough to spurt blood from the unfortunate man’s mouth.


Lazarus pointed to a wide arched door through which the cable conduits poured so thickly you couldn’t walk on stone to reach it. A half dozen enemies were forming up to block our progress, though how they planned to do that was unclear. It became a moot point as Lazarus fired his trans-uranic arquebus into the group. The report of the weapon was so loud and so bright that it stunned everyone in the room with its report. Most of the leading three enemies simply dissolved into a prismatic burst of expanding tissue. The survivors were hurled backwards like ragdolls, already dead from the hydrostatic shock of the blast. It is easy to think of Lazarus as a techpriest but he was also a soldier, scrambling up over the conduits with the speed and acumen any Imperial Guard trooper would be proud of. I followed with considerably less grace, the archway looked like a mouth with the conduits forming a braided and extended tongue, an image I did not find comforting. Cables rolled and twisted beneath my boots but I kept both my feet and my grip on my force staff.  From somewhere ahead of us the opening bars of Gloria Imperator began to play, crackling with the traditional vox static. 


The broadcast was starting.


The control chapel itself was a massive circular room with a raised central diaz. Atop the diaz stood a stone altar laid out with relics and incense burners. Great column soared three stories into the air, oozlite chased with gold, which supported a domed ceiling painted with sporting cherubs around a triumphant Emperor. A large gilded aquila hung behind the altar backed back carvings of the lives of the Emperor and his Primarchs. Thousands of niches marked the walls like the holes in Cembrian cheese. Each of these had once been an ossuary, but the bones of the faithful dead had been unceremoniously dumped onto the floor to form a knee deep carpet of tangled bones. Each ossuary now held a scroll. I tried to make a quick mental count but there must have been hundreds of thousands. Statues of saints, twenty feet tall, ringed the circular space. Perhaps half of them had been draped with chains which suspended cages in which naked men and women were suspended. Electrical cabling and neural linkages had been plugged into their eyes and spines, spilling outwards like a spiderweb towards the altar but not visible by the pict casters which would capture the service. This was why the Under Council had been interested in buying black market psykers. The broadcast was not just to be physical, but psychic. They were making the broadcast station into a psychic antenna. I shuddered to think of how many millions it would reach.


Behind the altar stood a priest in full vestments including a golden mitre. The distance was too great for my eyes but I was sure this was the priest I had met in the underhive. He raised both his hands, beginning his address. I lifted my pistol and fired, the bullet ricocheting off the altar. I tasted violets in the back of my throat as psychic energy began to flow outwards from the captive psykers.

“Lazarus!” I shouted but as I turned towards the Skitarii I saw three figures burst from side alcoves. They were squat and heavily muscled, twisted and grotesque. They plowed through the bones like snow clearing engines, flinging cracked remains in all directions. At first I took them for mutants, but then I registered the stim injectors and pacem visors wired into their skulls, as well as the long neural whips which had been grafted to the stumps of their arms. Arco-flagellants. Men and women who had been condemned for blasphemy to serve as living assault engines, their nervous systems rewired for pure aggression. I could smell the stink of chems from here as their biology was hyper charged for war and pain and suffering was pumped into their cerebrums, filling them with the raw need to kill as the only answer to their agony. The charged in eeire silence, with only the clatter of flying bones, like a million rolling dice, to accompany them. 


Above me the priest was beginning to drone into his opening address. I fired at him again, this time the shot glanced away not from the alter, but from a shimmering veil of psykannic energy he was drawing in from the unwilling donors. Cursing I turned and shot twice into the nearest captive psyker, his body jerked twice and went still, blood dripping from the cage as his body went limp, the power moving down his neural plugs sputtering and dying. If I could kill all the donor minds perhaps I could shoot the priest… but there was no time. Lazarus fired his weapon again, reducing one of the arco--flagellants and six feet of bone covered floor into a blue-white flare of calcium fire. The remaining two charged on as though they had not noticed. I fried at one of the onrushing brutes. A slaught injector on its shoulder burst in a spray of chemicals. I had just enough time to be proud of hitting something with my handgun when the bow wave of bones hit me, throwing me from my feet and down into the swirling maelstrom of the dead.