Editing Eversor (section)

==Kýrie Eléison==
'''Chapter One'''

Sick. The Officio Assassinorum drone always felt sick whenever he entered ‘the hive’. A long catwalk suspended in the middle of a cavernous hexagonal hall, the putrid green glow of endless status monitors and stasis tubes radiated an aura of death and decay. Not so unfitting for the legendary storage vaults of the Eversor Temple.

Despite his many trips to the hive, Nicolas Gilbo could never suppress the shiver in his spine that always snuck up on him when he least expected it. Shaking off his unease, he moved slowly to monitor station #4432 to finish the rites of rearming and release. He stared up into the face of death, suspended in a foetal position within its fluid tomb. The irony was not lost on him. A skeletal, barely human husk gazed vacantly back at him, its augmentics continually twitching despite being comatose. Out of curiosity, he flipped through this unit’s combat history. Unit service life three years. Number of sorties, two hundred and sixty. Estimated enemy casualties inflicted, eight thousand five hundred and twelve, half of those from a planetary governor’s dirigible brought down in the center of Falchion hive.

Biological age, twelve standard years.

But it was the list of wounds sustained in action that horrified him the most.

T3-T9 thoracic vertebrae shattered from an Ork Warboss, left arm amputated after close combat with World Eater Champion, fifty seven separate stubber and lasgun wounds. Three cardiac arrests and automated restarts, and it didn’t stop there. By the Emperor, what did it take to kill one of these things? With great trepidation, Gilbo keyed through the unit’s start up routine and assigned unit #4432 its next mission, to the planet of Kronos.

“What kind of dreams does a monster like you have?” Gilbo wondered.

Continued in [[Core of Brutality]]