Chapter One – The Storm Verloren crouched in the cave mouth, lifting the collar of his cloak to cover the lower half of his mask as the dust storm approached. The built in air filter would prevent him actually breathing in any of the airborne grit but it was a pain to clean if it got clogged. The rocky outcrop he’d selected overlooked the ruins nicely, giving him good vantage over the crumbled entrance. Fallen pillars lined the broken flagstones, providing ample cover for a defensive force. He pressed a button on the side of his mask and the lenses powered on. “Scan the area and feed the data direct to my HUD,” he told his Ghost, not that he needed to. Recon was essential preparation and his Ghost new him well enough by now to anticipate his orders. Verloren was a cautious man. Cautious men survived. The little Ghost zoomed off into the storm and, moments later, the view through the lenses began to alter. As the dust storm engulfed the ruins completely, a thin wireframe of green light took their place, highlighting all the surfaces and corners, building a map of the physical layout. Now Verloren could walk through even in pitch blackness. Just as he was thinking that this mission would be easy, his on-board scanner started to pick up life-signs. “Ghost,” he said into the comm. “Give me a bio-scan too.” Almost instantly new data began to feed into his lenses. Heat signatures. He didn’t need to look at the Ether readings to recognize Fallen when he saw them. Damn. He’d checked the most recent reports before he’d left the Tower and there had been no mention of Fallen this far into King’s Watch. Perhaps the recent destruction of their High Servitor, Sepiks Prime, had caused the House of Devils to flee North. The Fallen were often unpredictable in their tactics, mostly due to their own internal power struggles. Despite this, they remained a constant threat to the Last City. One thing was certain, Verloren thought as he counted the glowing figures now populating the wireframe overlay on his screen: his mission just got more difficult. He stole down from the rocks under the cover of the storm, drawing his knives from the sheaths at his hips as he did so. The sentries the Fallen had left outside were only Dregs, the lowest caste of their society, marked by the docking of two of their arms. Dregs were cowards and skirmishers, who held their own by ambush tactics and force of numbers. These ones never got the chance. Verloren cut each of them down before they had a chance to cry out. He stalked them through the whirling dust like one of nature’s great predators from before the collapse. Verloren had been into some of the ruined museums of Old Britain, in Flooded London. He’d seen the great stuffed cats with their huge powerful jaws and massive teeth and the river-dwelling reptiles with their armoured scales. He’d never seen a living one of these creatures, for all he knew there weren’t any left, but he identified with them anyway. He knew what it was to stalk your prey. He dragged one behind a pillar, covering its mouth as he buried his knife in its throat. Another he pounced on from above, after having scaled a section of ruined wall. A blow to the head dazed it before a blade-thrust to the base of the skull ended it. When he sheathed his knives and entered the ruins, he left eight Dregs dead behind him, throats slit and bodies punctured. Each of them had died quietly, with no chance to raise any alarm. Verloren descended into the ancient ruin like a spectre, bypassing those Fallen he could and silencing those he could not. Every corpse he left behind increased the chances of discovery; he had no time to properly hide them. He started to sweat inside his mask and he cursed the Fallen under his breath. What were the odds that they would set up camp here, in the very ruin he needed access to? Luck, as always, was not on his side. And that was not the only thing that concerned him. These Fallen weren’t wearing the red colour of the House of Devils. Instead they wore yellow and their symbol was unknown to him; a circle within three straight lines, two parallel and one crossing them both, like a talon surrounding the sun. Verloren put the mystery behind him, after all, he was no expert on the Fallen. Focus on the mission, he told himself. Get the relic and get out. The building had once been a vast underground launching station, back in the Golden Age. From here, ships had fired themselves across the cosmos to find new worlds and populate them. The design was a strange mixture of straight lines and functionality combined with an almost religious reverence. Long corridors, now filled with dust, were lined with pipes and wires overhead and the rooms he passed had shelves stocked with strange equipment the purpose of which he could only guess at, or else massive data banks and computer terminals whose screens were long dead. Verloren often wondered what life would have been like for him in the Golden Age. It was difficult to think of how he would fit in. He couldn’t imagine there was much work for thieves and assassins. Strange that he should feel more at home here, at the very edge of a broken civilization, amongst the monsters and the fiends. His lenses flashed a warning as his Ghost picked up a concentrated source of Ether. Verloren crouched into the shadows, double-checking that his cloaking field was engaged. Sure enough, a few moments later, a Servitor hovered past, screeching quietly in its strange mechanical language. The purple orb, like a giant robotic eye, click and whirred in its alien tongue, strange panels revolving around its surface. It cast a lurid light around itself as it moved, bathing the dusty room with dull lilac. Verloren double checked the map in his mind’s eye. It had been difficult to get blueprints of a building that had been ruined for centuries but there was a cryptarch who’d owed him a favour. It had still cost him an arm and a leg, mind. Of course, the blueprints were outdated and the building had partly collapsed over time but the layout was roughly the same. As Verloren crouched in amongst the rubble of a collapsed doorway, he considered his next move. The Servitor was hovering around the doorway he needed to access and was now flanked by a small squadron of Elder Vandals. Its personal guard, no doubt. Verloren didn’t know much about Fallen society, his expertise was primary focused on how to kill them, but he did know Servitors were usually well protected. They acted as a well-spring of sorts, providing the ranks of the Fallen with a supply of Ether, the life-force that gave them power. This one was too small to be a Prime Servitor but still all Servitors were dangerous. Verloren’s hand hovered close to the scout rifle on his back, the thin leather of his gloved fingertip caressing the handle as he weighed his options. He could take out the Servitor, and the Vandal guard too. It wouldn’t be difficult but it would be noisy. He’d passed maybe two dozen Fallen, Dregs and Vandals, on the way here. They would be behind him. Who knew how many were in front? He’d be surrounded. He moved his hand away from the rifle. No. Better to play it quiet. Get in, get the artefact, get out. He surveyed the room again looking for any way past the Servitor and its guards. That was when the alarm sounded. The Fallen were scavengers, a race of pirates and brigands with a strong military code of conduct. They made excellent skirmish fighters, with a particular fondness for guerilla tactics. You never knew what manner of traps you might encounter when entering a Fallen lair. No-one was sure how much of their technology was actually of their own make and how much was stolen or scavenged and twisted to suit their means. The alarm might have been some long dormant system of the building itself, or it might have been something they brought with them. Either way, the Fallen reacted instantly. Half of the Vandals around the Servitor drew swords, one for each of their four hands. The other half pulled rifles from their backs. Precision weapons, dealing a powerful shot of arc-based damage. They could punch through plasteel without much trouble. Verloren stayed still. Alarms filled him with the urge to flee or fight but he fought those primal instincts down. This was not the Reef and he was a thieving child no longer. He was a Guardian, once dead and reborn again in Light. The Servitor barked orders in its unsettling robotic language. Just hearing its voice made Verloren cringe. He wondered if that was a reaction of the Light inside him to the inherent foulness of the creatures or just his own personal distaste for them. He didn’t despise the Fallen as some did, though he could understand that feeling; after all, the Fallen were the most immediate threat to the Last City, constantly scratching at the walls of mankind’s last true stronghold. To Verloren, they were simply an obstacle. Whatever the Servitor said, the Elder Vandals obeyed instantly, leaping to attention then jogging away, past Verloren and out of the room towards the surface. The Servitor floated along behind them, cackling and whirring, its strange plates still spinning across its surface. Verloren made a face beneath his mask as its light moved over his hiding place, seeping across the metal walls of the room. He was still cloaked and confident that it wouldn’t see him, but he didn’t want that eerie light to touch him. As though it might corrupt him in some way. With the Servitor and its retinue gone, Verloren was free to move from his hiding place and further into the ruins but he couldn’t help but wonder what it was that had tripped the alarm. A Hive incursion perhaps? Lord knew that they were becoming ever more prevalent on Earth, no longer content with just the Moon as their territory. Or was it a group of Guardians sent from the Vanguard?