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represented. He had never asked. He knew that Dravere had seen at least as much as him and had taken every ounce of glory for it that he could. Sometimes Flense resented the fact that the lord general always wore his decorations. He supposed it was because the lord general had them and he did not. That was what it meant to be a lord general.
    The ducal palace on whose veranda they now stood was miraculously intact after six months of serial bombardment and overlooked the wide rift valley of Diemos, once the hydro-electric industrial heartland of Fortis Binary, now the axis on which the war revolved. In all directions, as far as the eye could see, sprawled the gross architecture of the manufacturing zone: the towers and hangars, the vaults and bunkers, the storage tanks and chimney stacks. A great ziggurat rose to the north, the brilliant gold icon of the Adeptus Mechanicus displayed on its flank. It rivalled, perhaps even surpassed, the Temple of the Ecclesiarchy, dedicated to the God-Emperor. But then, the Tech-Priests of Mars would argue this entire world was a shrine to the God-Machine Incarnate.
    The ziggurat had been the administrative heart of the Tech-Priests’ industry on Fortis, from where they directed a workforce of nineteen billion in the production of armour and heavy weaponry for the Imperial war machine. It was a burned-out shell now. It had been the uprising’s first target.
    In the far hills of the valley, in fortified factories, worker habitats and material store yards, the enemy was dug in – a billion strong, a vast massed legion of daemoniac cultists. Fortis Binary was a primary Imperial forge world, muscular and energetic in its industrial production.
    No one knew how the Ruinous Powers had come to corrupt it, or how a huge section of the massive labour force had been infected with the taint of the Fallen Gods. But it had happened. Eight months before, almost overnight, the vast manufactory arks and furnace-plants of the Adeptus Mechanicus had been overthrown by the Chaos-corrupted workforce, once bonded to serve the machine cult. Only a scarce few of the Tech-Priests had escaped the sudden onslaught and evacuated off-world.
    Now the massed legions of the Imperial Guard were here to liberate this world, and the action was very much determined by the location. The master-factories and tech-plants of Fortis Binary were too valuable to be stamped flat by an orbital bombardment.
    Whatever the cost, for the good of the Imperium, this world had to be retaken a pace at a time, by men on the ground: fighting men, Imperial Guard, soldiers who would, by the sweat of their backs, root out and destroy every last scrap of Chaos and leave the precious industries of the forge world ready and waiting for re-population.
    ‘Every few days they try us again, pushing at another line of our trenches, trying to find a weak link.’ The lord general looked back into his scope at the carnage fifteen kilometres away.
    ‘The Tanith First are strong fighters, general, so I have heard.’ Flense approached Dravere and stood with his hands behind his back. The scar-tissue of his cheek pinched and twitched slightly, as it often did when he was tense. ‘They have acquitted themselves well on a number of campaigns and Gaunt is said to be a resourceful leader.’
    ‘You know him?’ the general looked up from his eyepiece, questioningly.
    Flense paused. ‘I know of him, sir. In the main by reputation,’ he said, swallowing many truths, ‘but I have met him in passing. His philosophy of leadership is not in tune with mine.’
    ‘You don’t like him, do you, Flense?’ Dravere asked pertinently. He could read Flense like a book, and could see some deep resentment lay in the colonel’s heart when it came to the subject of the infamous and heroic Commissar Gaunt. He knew what it was. He’d read the reports. He also knew Flense would never actually mention it.
    ‘Frankly? No, sir. He is a commissar. A political officer. But by