'Captain Loken?'
He looked up from his work. 'That's me.'
'Forgive me for interrupting.' she said.'You're busy.'
Loken set aside the segment of armour he had been polishing and rose to his feet. He was almost a metre taller than her, and naked but for a loin cloth. She sighed inwardly at the splendour of his physique. The knotted muscles, the old ridge-scars. He was handsome too, this one, fair hair almost silver, cut short, his pale skin slightly freckled, his eyes grey like rain. What a waste, she thought.
Though there was no disguising his inhumanity, especially in this bared form. Apart from the sheer mass of him, mere was the overgrown gigantism of the face, that particular characteristic of the Astartes, almost equine, plus the hard, taut shell of his rib-less torso, like stretched canvas.
'I don't know who you are.' he said, dropping a nub of polishing fibre into a little pot and wiping his fingers.
She held out her hand. 'Mersadie Oliton, official remembrancer.' she said. He looked at her tiny hand and then shook it, making it seem even more tiny in comparison with his own giant fist.
'I'm sorry.' she said, laughing, 'I keep forgetting you don't do that out here. Shaking hands, I mean. Such a parochial, Terran custom.'
'I don't mind it. Have you come from Terra?'
'I left there a year ago. Despatched to the crusade by permit of the Council.'
'You'ге a remembrancer?'
'You know what that means?'
'I'm not stupid.' Loken said.
'Of course not.' she said, hurriedly. 'I meant no offence.'
'None taken.' He eyed her. Small and frail, though possibly beautiful. Loken had very little experience of women. Perhaps they were all frail and beautiful. He knew enough to know that few were as black as her. Her skin was like burnished coal. He wondered if it were some kind of dye.
He wondered too about her skull. Her head was bald, but not shaved. It seemed polished and smooth as if it had never known hair. The cranium was enhanced somehow, extending back in a streamlined sweep that formed a broad ovoid behind her nape. It was like she had been crowned, as if her simple humanity had been made more regal.
'How can I help you?' he asked.
'I understand you have a story, a particularly entertaining one. I'd like to remember it, for posterity.'
'Which story?'
'Horus killing the Emperor.'
He stiffened. He didn't like it when non-Astartes humans called the Warmaster by his true name.
'That happened months ago.' he said dismissively. 'I'm sure I won't remember the details particularly well.'
'Actually,' she said, 'I have it on good authority you can be persuaded to tell the tale quite expertly. I've been told it's very popular amongst your battle-brothers.'
Loken frowned. Annoyingly, the woman was correct. Since the taking of the High City, he'd been required - forced would not be too strong a word - to retell his first-hand account of the events in the palace tower on dozens of occasions. He presumed it was because of Sejanus's death. The Luna Wolves needed catharsis. They needed to hear how Sejanus had been so singularly avenged.
'Someone put you up to this, Mistress Oliton?' he asked.
She shrugged. 'Captain Torgaddon, actually.'
Loken nodded. It was usually him. 'What do you want to know?'
'I understand the general situation, for I have heard it from others, but I'd love to have your personal observations. What was it like? When you got inside the palace itself, what did you find?'
Loken sighed, and looked round at the rack where his power armour was displayed. He'd only just started cleaning it. His private arming chamber was a small, shadowy vault adjoining the off-limits embarkation deck, the metal walls lacquered pale green. A cluster of glow-globes lit the room, and an Imperial eagle had been stencilled on one wall plate, beneath which copies of Loken's various oaths of moment had been pinned. The close air smelled of oils and lapping powder. It was a tranquil, introspective place, and she had invaded that tranquility.
Becoming aware of her trespass, she suggested, 'I could come back later, at a better time.'
'No, now's fine.' He sat back down on the metal stool where he had been perching when she'd entered. 'Let me see... When we got inside the palace, what we found was the Invisibles.'
'Why were they called that?' she asked.
'Because we couldn't see them.’ he replied.


The Invisibles were waiting for them, and they well deserved their sobriquet.
Just ten paces into the splendid apartments, the first brother died. There was an odd, hard bang, so hard it was painful to feel and hear, and Brother Edrius fell to his knees, then folded onto his side. He had been struck in the face by some form of energy weapon. The white plasteel/ceramite alloy of his visor and breastplate had actually deformed into a rippled crater, like heated wax that had flowed and then set again. A second bang, a quick concussive vibration of air, obliterated an ornamental table beside Nero Vipus. A third bang dropped Brother Muriad, his left leg shattered and snapped off like a reed stalk.
The science adepts of the false Imperium had mastered and harnessed some rare and wonderful form of field technology, and armed their elite guard with it. They cloaked their bodies with a passive application, twisting light to render themselves invisible. And they were able to project it in a merciless, active form that struck with mutilating force.
Despite the fact that they had been advancing combat-ready and wary, Loken and the others were taken completely off guard. The Invisibles were even hidden to their visor arrays. Several had simply been standing in the chamber, waiting to strike.
Loken began to fire, and Vipus's men did likewise. Raking the area ahead of him, splintering furniture, Loken hit something. He saw pink mist kiss the air, and something fell down with enough force to overturn a chair. Vipus scored a hit too, but not before Brother Tarregus had been struck with such power that his head was punched clean off his shoulders.
The cloak technology evidently hid its users best if they remained still. As they moved, they became semi-visible, heat-haze suggestions of men surging to attack. Loken adapted quickly, firing at each blemish of air. He adjusted his visor gain to full contrast, almost black and white, and saw them better: hard outlines against the fuzzy background. He killed three more. In death, several lost their cloaks. Loken saw the Invisibles revealed as bloody corpses. Their armour was silver, ornately composed and machined with a remarkable detail of patterning and symbols. Tall, swathed in mantles of red silk, the Invisibles reminded Loken of the mighty Custodian Guard that warded the Imperial Palace on Terra. This was the bodyguard corps which had executed Sejanus and his glory squad at a mere nod from their master.
Nero Vipus was raging, offended by the cost to his squad. The hand of the ship was truly upon him.
He led the way, cutting a path into a towering room beyond the scene of the ambush. His fury gave Locasta the opening it needed, but it cost him his right hand, crushed by an Invisible's blast. Loken felt choler too. Like Nero, the men of Locasta were his friends. Rituals of mourning awaited him. Even in the darkness of Ullanor, victory had not been so dearly bought.
Charging past Vipus, who was down on his knees, groaning in pain as he tried to pluck the mangled gauntlet off his ruined hand, Loken entered a side chamber, shooting at the air blemishes that attempted to block him. A jolt of force tore his bolter from his hands, so he reached over his hip and drew his chainsword from its scabbard. It whined as it kicked into life. He hacked at the faint outlines jostling around him and felt the toothed blade meet resistance. There was a shrill scream. Gore drizzled out of nowhere and plastered the chamber walls and the front of Loken's suit.
'Lupercal!' he grunted, and put the full force of both arms behind his strokes. Servos and mimetic polymers, layered between his skin and his suit's outer plating to form the musculature of his power armour, bunched and flexed. He landed a trio of two-handed blows. More blood showered into view. There was a warbled shriek as loops of pink, wet viscera suddenly became visible. A moment later, the field screening the soldier flickered and failed, and revealed his disembowelled form, stumbling away down the length of the chamber, trying to hold his guts in with both hands.
Invisible force stabbed at Loken again, scrunching the edge of his left shoulder guard and almost knocking him off his feet. He rounded and swung the chainsword. The blade struck something, and shards of metal flew out. The shape of a human figure, just out of joint with the space it occupied, as if it had been cut out of the air and nudged slightly to the left, suddenly filled in. One of the Invisibles, his charged field sparking and crackling around him as it died, became visible and swung his long, bladed lance at Loken.
The blade rebounded off Loken's helm. Loken struck low with his chainsword, ripping the lance out of the Invisible's silver gauntlets and buckling its haft. At the same time, Loken lunged, shoulder barging the warrior against the chamber wall so hard that the friable plaster of the ancient frescoes crackled and fell out.
Loken stepped back. Winded, his lungs and ribcage almost crushed flat, the Invisible made a gagging, sucking noise and fell down on his knees, his head lolling forward. Loken sawed his chainsword down and sharply up again in one fluid, practiced mercy stroke, and the Invisible's detached head bounced away.
Loken circled slowly, the humming blade raised ready in his right hand. The chamber floor was slick with blood and black scraps of meat. Shots rang out from nearby rooms. Loken walked across the chamber and retrieved his bolter, hoisting it in his left fist with a clatter.
Two Luna Wolves entered the chamber behind him, and Loken briskly pointed them off into the left-hand colonnade with a gesture of his sword.
'Form up and advance.’ he snapped into his link. Voices answered him.
'Nero?'
'I'm behind you, twenty metres.’
'How's the hand?'
'I left it behind. It was getting in the way.'