The disturbance first announced itself to the avian world. A shimmer eel, an adolescent about four meters long, whipped frantically downward through the sky. It had been chasing a bloom of floaters, the microscopic airborne plankton that inhabited the upper stratosphere of Luce Prime. Then it noticed the change in temperature.

  Skittish by nature, the shimmer eel fled, racing towards its nest, its translucent scales fluttering with alarm as its dorsal eye identified a fiery red bloom in the darkness above. The shape expanded fast, morphing into a crimson eye with a dark pupil at its center. The eel screeched and darted laterally. The flaming eye plummeted straight down, scorching the empty air where the eel had been, basalt-black smoke trailing in its wake.

  Shaken by the ordeal, the eel retreated away from the area, its nostril slits contracting in response to the smoke’s pungent, fusilic odor. Within an hour, it forgot all about the incident. Luce Prime was a dangerous place. Those who did not acclimate did not survive.

  Already far below, in a dark sarcophagus of superheated metal alloy, an angel fell from heaven. He breathed slowly, his twin hearts pounding as gravity lashed and kicked at his genetically augmented body. A maroon warning ikon, one of several on his drop pod’s central console, flashed mournfully up at him. The image showed a cracked circular disk. He recognized the symbol immediately. It signified hull failure.

  “Throne,” the angel cursed laconically.

  Clicks began to sound over the craft’s audio systems. Proximity alerts, slow and infrequent at first, they sounded with increasing frequency as the craft neared the hive world’s surface. The sounds coalesced into a single dull thrum and the pod’s deceleration jets roared angrily.

  The angel felt his muscles tense.

  A hab-tower shuddered as the drop pod punctured through its superstructure. The craft spun wildly. The building’s fa?ade of glasscrete windows wrinkled like shook silk, then exploded outward, showering panicked hive workers in a lethal rain of fragments.

  Fire still spurted from the pod’s jets. The emission sent the pod tumbling back out of the building, spinning helplessly before it toppled into the underhive below.

  A carnival of red lights flashed in front of the angel now. Hull failure. Atmospheric breach. Propulsion error. Fuel leak.

  Then the craft struck something hard and slid off it. Another impact followed, then another, then another. The pod’s sole passenger, the angel, felt his metal anchor harness groan with the strain of holding his ceramite-clad form in place. Then, all at once, everything went still, and the hammer blow of inertia descended upon the angel like the wrath of a vengeful god.

  A Lucean dung beetle buzzed in annoyance as four tons of red-hot metal obliterated the pile of feces it had spent the day gathering. A heatwave, radiating outward from the shattered pod, washed over the beetle, drawing another irritated click. The afternoon had been a cold one, and the insectile creature instinctively recoiled from the sudden metabolic increase which the hot air precipitated. Skittering away, chittering quietly to itself, the beetle’s life came to a sudden end when a boot of human flesh descended wrathfully upon its carapace.

  The boot’s owner was Umus Wir. A lean, hungry-eyed man of about thirty-five standard years, Wir moved silently towards the flaming wreckage of the pod. Around him, steel beams and moldering granite archways rose ominously towards a dark ceiling. A weak gray light filtered down from a hole in that ceiling now, casting its sickly beam upon this unexpected gift from the gods. Undaunted by the deafening roar of the crash, Wir closed in on this rare bounty, a jagged bone-knife clutched tightly in his right hand.

  Other inhabitants of the underhive noticed the commotion as well. They descended towards it like a hyena pack circling a wounded prey animal. Nothing, they knew, could have survived such a crash. There might, however, be valuable salvage. If nothing else, the flames which enveloped the wreck offered a chance to escape the cold. So they crept in, eyeing one another suspiciously as they came. Soon the gangers would arrive and drive them off. The organized criminal bands never shared the spoils of salvage if they could help it.

  Umus Wir knew his time was limited. He sprang forward, sliding between man-sized chunks of rubble, careful not to touch any glowing metal fragments as he went. He heard something behind him and spun, thrusting his bone knife forward. A hive dog snarled up at him, blue saliva dripping from its white teeth. Wir snarled back. The dog eyed him warily, then slunk backwards. Wir watched it retreat, mindful that the move might be a feint. When it reached a satisfactory distance, Wir hooted gleefully and turned back towards the craft. And saw the angel.

  He rose from the wreck like some chthonic giant forged in the forgotten titanomachy that built the universe. He peered down at Wir through blood-red visor slits, his gray armor shining ominously in the pale light. Wir felt the ichor drain from his face. He staggered backward, his spine colliding against a granite slab and sending a jolt of pain coursing through him.

  Bending down, the angel retrieved his blade and bolter from their maglocked mounts. He ignored the gawping scavenger, whose bone knife posed little threat. He checked his weapons with a practiced eye, cataloguing every sign of damage. His chainsword appeared completely unharmed, remarkable given that the final impact had sheared the top off the drop pod, nearly decapitating the angel himself. His bolter suffered little worse. Its iron sights showed signs of warping, yes, but the essential mechanisms all seemed intact His three belt-clipped grenades exhibited no signs of serious wear. He had been lucky. Very lucky.

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  Satisfied, the giant extruded himself from the wreckage. His helm’s sensors swept the room around him as he went, identifying more than eighty heat signatures in the surrounding darkness. Hostiles, potentially, even probably. He might need to deal with that in a moment.

  For the instant, however, the angel busied himself with running diagnostic divinations, checking the reliability of his venerable armor systems. The fall alone would have killed a baseline human. Thanks to his armor and genetic modifications, it merely left him feeling sore. Still, the pod’s system failures concerned him. His technology and armaments represented the very best the Imperium had to offer. Even these, though, could fall prey to the deleterious effects of the Warp. And, right now, those effects were stronger than ever.

  “Who are you?” Wir demanded in low Gothic, his voice flushed with anger.

  The angel turned back towards the wreckage. The scavenger stared up at him with malignant eyes. The angel almost pitied him. Those who dwelt in the depths of Imperial hive worlds knew only two emotions, fear and rage. And fear was such a universal constant in their lives that even it began to fade after a few decades, leaving only rage. Rage made men act stupidly, made them leap into situations that would certainly prove fatal.

  The angel met Wir’s gaze with a glare of his own. But the scavenger’s adrenaline pumped through his veins now. He could not back down, not anymore. He lusted after the angel’s blade, after his armor, though two men together would not be able to lift either between then.

  “Gimme,” Wir barked, gesturing towards the chainsword with his knife. Ignoring the request, the giant turned away.

  Seeing his opportunity, Wir leapt forward, slamming his bone knife into the soft-looking black mesh at the back of the giant’s knee. The blade glanced off the fabric as if it were solid steel, chipping the edge of Wir’s knife, blunting it.

  The angel ignored the attack, scanning the darkness, tracking the others who surrounded him now. Some saw Wir’s failed attack and withdrew. Others, however, grew bolder. They closed in, their intent unmistakable. Where one alone could not succeed, many together might hope to achieve something. And so, like tonswallows surrounding a shimmer eel, they rushed forward towards their larger prey together.

  Sighing, the angel rolled his armored shoulders, loosening them, and went to work.

  He spun, chainsword roaring, and decapitated Umus Wir. Blood spattered the giant’s gray armor. The sight of it produced a feral madness in the approaching crowd. They crashed forward in a wave of flesh and bone. Silently, the angel strode into the wave. Leaving his bolter maglocked to his thigh, he pummeled through them with blade and gauntlet, each blow a killing stroke. Corpses flew backward, colliding into their former fellows before sprawling to the floor, bones twisted at inhuman angles.

  A dreg leapt onto the giant’s back, throwing a length of rope around his armored neck and yanking backwards with all his weight, but the angel simply reached back, seizing the man’s outstretched arm, and ripped him up through the air. The man spiraled, slammed into a steel column, and dropped to the floor.

  Thirty seconds later, it was all over. Crumpled flesh heaps and detritus littered the floor, heatsign leaking slowly from the corpses.

  More heat signatures appeared in the darkness, however, clustered together in tight, semi-organized mobs. These, the giant knew, would be ganger squads. Better armored, better equipped, and far more cunning. Most were rival groups, he imagined, but they might cooperate for a prize such as this one. These probably still only presented a minor threat, but he might be forced to expend his precious bolter rounds—

  Without warning, the gangers withdrew, vanishing back into the cold darkness. The angel blinked, confused. Had his sensory arrays malfunctioned? He doubted it. He could still see a few gangers, pulling away more slowly than their companions. They were all still out there, just beyond his ability to detect. Something, though, had frightened them. Something other than him.

  There, to the northwest, he found it. A massive shape loomed in the distance, its heat signature twisted and malformed and, in some places, incredibly hot. It lurched unhurriedly towards his position. A metallic voice rang out from that direction. His helm’s audio feed must have been distorted by the crash, because the voice crackled mechanically in the distance. “Noli luci confidere,” it warned in high Gothic. Do not trust the light.

  Snatching up his bolter, the giant snapped off a shot at the oncoming shape. The bolter coughed. A split second later, a second concussion sounded as the shell’s propellant ignited, speeding it towards its target. A deafening shriek filled the cavern as the round struck home and the huge creature slank backwards, wounded but apparently alive.

  The angel’s finger was tightening around the trigger when he heard another sound, this one far louder still. A squat-bodied Arvus lighter, the Imperium’s ultra-reliable troop transport, descended through the ragged gap in the ceiling, engines roaring. Stepping back, the angel raised his chainsword toward the aircraft in a battlefield salute. He smiled behind his helm as it waggled its wings slightly in reply before setting down a dozen meters away, kicking up dust.

  The transport's ramp slid down and two dozen black-clad soldiers trotted out, surrounding their landing site in a defensive circle, weapons trained on the darkness beyond. Behind them came a smartly dressed older man in the same garb. Insignia of rank adorned his shoulders on either side, identifying him as a commanding officer. He approached the angel directly, his gait steady and confident, his eyes fixed firmly on the armored warrior. He stopped at a distance of two meters and saluted, his white mustache wrinkling in a slight smile.

  “Hail, lord Space Marine,” the commander said.

  “Hail, captain,” the Space Marine replied. His helm distored his speech. The crash had damaged his vox.

  “Welcome to Luce Prime, my lord. My name is Derrida, and I’ve come to get you out of here.”