Salo looked over the platoon and grunted. "I hope everyone's settling with their mechanicus representative well. You're stuck with them, remember." A small chuckle from the crowd, a dissaproving shift of the mechandrites from Emestos. "Collect your gear from the munitorum depot and meet at muster point nine. Primary vox-channel is four-oh-three, secondary is five-two-two. Objective sheets and maps will be given out with the gear, and may the grace of the god-emperor go with you."

A flurry of salutes. Emestos clicked his hands gently into the cog-wheel symbol.

---

The munitorum depot was a pile of crates set up in one of the larger warehouses, manned by an ex-soldier called Quaggs with an augumetic hip, and a group of servitors. Cronyn offered the requisition chit to Quaggs, who passed a scanner over it and grunted, before turning to the servitors and shouting quick instructions to them. Two began hauling heavy crates of clinking fire-bombs packed in plastek over to Nox Noctis Equa and strapped them onto the outside, another dumped a stack of bulbous scatter missiles into private Dipstick's surprised arms.

"Also, the auspex. I guess you'll be wanting this?" Quaggs offered the auspex to Varuck, who took it eagerly.

"There's one of them already in the box." Harkon called from the chimera, where he'd been checking the box of firebombs, but Quaggs had already turned away to shepherd a group of servitors carrying a pallet of autocannon rounds with gleeful disregard for the laws of physics.

Harkon jogged over to Varuck, and compared auspexes. Both were normal size and shape, but the aerials were heavier and chunkier than most, and they seemed to have at one point been painted Mechanicus red. They didn't have the usual dial for changing modes: just the one setting. Varuck turned it on; it took a second to warm up and then the needle lazily scrolled around the face. Whatever it was searching for, it didn't find it: no contacts were reported.

"This one's broken too." Harkon reported, giving it a slap on the side. "Looks like there's something written on the back."