by Dan Abnett
A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL
RAVENOR
Ravenor - 01
Dan Abnett
(An Undead Scan v1.0)
For Marc Gascoigne
"I see comedy as a kind of amphibious landing craft..."
With, always, thanks and love to Nik for her patience and suggestions
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
"The great procession of the triumph passed under the Spatian Gate, and I marched with it, into the atrocity. That ceremonial arch, so splendid and massive, forms a threshold in the course of my life. I stepped across it and was remade, transmuted from one form into another.
"Some have said that I was crippled beyond the measure of a man. I do not see it that way.
"I believe I was liberated."
-Gideon Ravenor, preface to The Mirror of Smoke
THEN
Local summer time, Southern landmass, Zenta Malhyde, 397.M41
He was sleeping in his habitent when the cries of the indigens woke him.
"Ekoh! Ekoh! N'nsa skte me'du!"
He sat up fast, sweat streaking down his bare torso. He'd been dreaming about the Vents of Sleef. Always the drop, the long drop into the bowels of hell...
"Ekoh! H'ende! N'nsa skte me'du!"
His Cognitae-trained mind fumbled for a translation. That damned indigen argot. "Ekoh"... that was pay heed or great news, and "h'ende" was a formal title he was fast getting used to. The rest? "Nsa skt"... that was a verb form. Parse it, for Throne's sake... finding of a thing, I find, he, she, it finds, we find...
Great gods of nowhere!
He scrambled to his feet, naked, and reached for his bodyglove, which hung like a sloughed lizard skin over the back of the trestle chair. Ambient temp was already high in the forties, and the habitent's viropump was struggling to breathe cool air into the unlit prefab.
The door-flap of the habitent drew back and the awful, prickling heat rushed in. Kyband came with it. His long black hair was lank with sweat, and the corners of his eyes and mouth were raw where he had taken too long to scrape out nte-fly eggs.
"Get dressed, Zyg," Kyband said. Despite the weeping redness, his eyes were bright. "The little bastards have cracked it."
Outside, the shocking heat made him gasp despite himself. The indigene were thronging around the camp's habitents, chattering excitedly and waving their dirty fingers at the sky. Nung the ogryn had to drive them back with a lash. Kyband went to get his weapon, slapping flies away from his face.
Molotch fastened up his bodyglove. Just ten seconds in the open heat and already his sweat was pouring out inside its rubberised sheath. He set a straw hat on his head. "Where?" he asked. "Site C," said Kyband.
It was only a ten-minute walk from the camp, but every step was an effort. Molotch quickly realised he'd left his glare-shades back in the tent. His eyes began to ache and tear up in the intense sunlight. The day glare seared white against the powder rock and glinted mercilessly off the shiny, ink-black cups and tubes of the fleshy vegetation.
The indigens ran around and ahead of them, urging them along, their scrawny, tanned bodies indifferent to the frying heat.
"Site C, eh?" Molotch panted. "And there was I putting money on D. Who'd have thought it?"
"Not Nung," said Nung, though, in fairness, there were very few things he ever thought of all by himself.
Through one last glade of stinking black tubers and they came out into the hard shadows of the pillars. Formed of white crystal, the pillars rose as high as thirty metres, like the columns of some lost temple. Boros Dias had assured Molotch they were an entirely natural geo-form. The treacherous pathway wound between the pillars all the way down to the cliff face. Their feet- particularly the bare feet of the scampering indigens - kicked up sheets of white dust from the path. The clouds made Molotch and Kyband cough and spit. Nung appeared untroubled. The ogryn displayed a remarkable resilience to physical discomfort. An nte-egg infestation had swollen and necrotised the flesh of his face from behind his left ear to his eye-line, and even that didn't seem to bother him.
At site C, the servito-excavators had dug out a whole section of the grainy white cliff-face, and Nung had personally used a flamer to torch away the last of the overhanging growth. A ragged cleft had been exposed in the facing. Two weeks' worth of back-breaking labour by the indigens had cleared the cleft of rabble and revealed it.
Lynta was standing guard by the opening.
The shouting from the indigens grew louder and Molotch turned to Kyband.
"This requires privacy," he said.
Kyband nodded. He pulled the bolt pistol from his belt holster and held it up. It had taken them a while to learn, but the indigens now understood what it did. They fled in terror, every last one of them, their triumphant whoops turning into hasty yelps.
The site fell silent but for the gurgle of sap, the whistle of insects and the buzzing crackle of the sun.
"Lynta?"
She walked over to them, mopping perspiration from her brow. Her bodyglove was set to max-chill, and rapidly thawing frost was fuming off her lean figure.
"The doc says we have it at last, h'ende," she said.
"Don't call me that. It makes you sound like a heathen."
Lynta smiled. "We're all heathens, aren't we, Zygmunt?"
"After this, Lynta, we'll all be gods," he replied and turned his body sideways to slide in through the narrow cleft. "Zygmunt?" she called out, halting him.
"What?"
"When are you going to tell us? When are you going to tell us what it is you and the doc are after here? Me and Kyband... the rest... we deserve to know."
Molotch looked into her bright green eyes. They were murder-hard. He knew she was right. Purchased loyalty would only stretch so far.
"Soon," he said and wriggled into the cleft. Boros Dias was twenty metres inside, in the darkness, and he was caked in dust. He was instructing two servitors about a painstaking method of excavation. Fan-units in the back of their distended necks whirred as they blew air into the crevices that Dias' light-wand illuminated.
"There you are," painstaking said Boros Dias.
"What have you found?"
"See for yo
urself," said Boros Dias. He raised his wand-beam over the ancient carvings on the semi-exposed wall. "I see scratchings, and hollows plugged with dust," said Molotch. "Do what I pay you to do."
Boros Dias sighed. Just eighteen months earlier, he had been magister tutorae xenos at the Universitariat of Thracian, one of the most admired academics in his field.
"I see certain structure forms," he said. "They have the corresponding vowel shapes and interrogative functions."
"Is it Enuncia?" Molotch asked.
"I believe it is. But I would not dare try to voice any of it. Not without further study."
Molotch pushed him aside. "You're a coward," he declared.
Molotch had spent five years familiarising himself with the basic vocatives and palate sounds. He ran his fingers over the bas-relief, and tried a word.
It sounded like shhhfkkt.
The cranium of the servitor unit next to him burst in a splatter of gore, brain-matter and spinning metal fragments. Molotch's mouth began to stream with blood. The other servitor went berserk and started to beat its forehead against the far wall of the chamber. It carried on until its head smashed and came off.
Molotch staggered backwards, retching up blood. He spat out one of his own front teeth.
"I said it was too dangerous!" Boros Dias cried.
Molotch grabbed him by the throat. "I haven't come so far, and suffered so much, to throw this away! For frig's sake, doctor! I lost eighteen good men cutting my way through that tau cadre just to be here!"
"I think maybe the tau knew this was forbidden." Boros Dias ventured.
Molotch punched him in the face, knocking him onto the narrow cave's dusty floor.
"Know, doctor, my basic tenet is that nothing is forbidden. Zygmunt Molotch has lived his life by that philosophy."
"Then Zygmunt Molotch is damned," whimpered Boros Dias.
"I never said I wasn't," Molotch said. "Get on. I need some air."
Molotch pushed his way back out of the deft into the appalling sunlight.
"What the hell happened to you?" Lynta asked when she saw his mouth.
"Nothing." Molotch answered. Kyband and Nung stood nearby, gazing into the forest. Emmings joined them. The leathery Imperial Guard vet was cradling his trophy pulse rifle and muttering with the other two in a low voice.
"What's the matter?"
"We might have company," Kyband said, looking round. He gestured towards the black, fleshy stalks and fronds of the surrounding jungle beyond the pillars. "Out there." Molotch followed the gesture and winced. The world was too bright to look at except through a squint.
"Nung can smell it," Nung said.
"Company? What sort of company?" Molotch snapped.
"Bad company," said Lynta, pulling out her snub-las. "Throne agents."
"The doctor needs more time," said Molotch. "Rouse everyone. We'll deal with this."
Kyband voxed the camp and Hehteng joined them quickly. The fur on his muzzle was spiky and dank and his tongue lolled with the heat. When he spoke Low Gothic, it sounded like a scavenger snaffling at a marrowbone, but Kyband had known him long enough to get the gist.
"Salton and Xuber are still too sick to come." Kyband relayed. "The maggots are in Salton's gut now. He's bleeding out."
"So noted." Molotch replied. Hehteng had brought the drone monitor handset from the camp and Molotch took it from him. He studied the little screen display. None of the sentry drones ranged around the camp area and site zones had triggered at all.
"Seems like a false alarm," Molotch said. "But we'll check them all by hand."
He led them back up the baking white track between the pillars to the stinking wall of soft, black vegetation. He longed for his glare-goggles. His eyes were aching. The flare-bright sun was high in the colourless sky, and mirrorkites were turning slow circles on the thermals far overhead.
They entered the noxious miasma of the jungle. Bars of sunlight stabbed down between the glossy black tube-forms and puckered cup flowers. The rancid air was seething with nte-flies, and larger, bottle green crawlers writhed in the oozy sap of the cups or dangled from the swollen nectaries. There was a scent of gangrene.
They spread out, their boots squelching through the smaller, ground-covering tubes, bursting some and spilling their fetid juices. Molotch looked up at the canopy - a lattice of white light and black growths - and took his straw hat off to wipe a hand across his dripping scalp.
There was a flash, a whoop of superheated air, and the world tumbled over on its end.
Molotch found himself lying on his back. His face was wet. A dull, concussive numbness was in his brain, a raw ache in his right thigh. The canopy above him continued to form a lattice of light and darkness. As he watched, two incandescent bolts of las-fire, each shaped like an elongated spearhead the length of an adult human forearm, squealed overhead.
He could hear frantic shouting around him - Nung bellowing, Kyband yelling - and the throaty boom of a bolt pistol. Then, on top of that, the high-pitched zap-spit of a pulse rifle on rapid auto.
Molotch sat up. He was spattered with root sap. There was a bloody hole the size of a bottle top through his thigh. Mulch worms and flies were already invading it.
"Oh God-Emperor..." he breathed. He crawled behind a fat, drooping tuber. More las-fire whined past. Several bolts punched into foliage, vomiting sprays of sap and chunks of black plant-meat. Kyband was in cover nearby, squeezing off shots with his bolt pistol. Beyond him, Emmings was hosing the forest with rapid fire from his precious pulse rifle. To Molotch's certain knowledge, Emmings had killed forty-five men, eleven tau, twenty-three greens and five eldar. He'd accomplished that score with a battered Guard-issue long-las. Ever since he'd picked up the handsome tau weapon as spoils of combat, he'd been itching to use it.
Nung was finally making a response to pain. Like Molotch, the ogryn had been caught by the first salvo. He was bellowing, blood was squirting out of a scorched hole in his side.
Molotch struggled over to Nung's aid, shots shrilling above his head. The ogryn was in bad shape. A secondary wound, just a glancing injury, had burst open the infested tissue of his cheek, and larval grubs were pouring out down his neck and shoulder. Molotch stuck Nung with a one-use tranq-blunt from his belt pack. "Come on! Come on, Nung!" he urged. The ogryn stopped bellowing. He glanced at Molotch with an unreadable expression that might have been gratitude, and then rolled his massive bulk over onto all fours. So arranged, he shuffled over through the ooze as far as the next main tuber growth, and then unshipped the Korsh 50 assault cannon from the syn-hide boot on his back. Nung wore three heavy dram magazines from his waist belt the way an ordinary human carried water bottles. His fat fingers fumbled to connect the belt feed.
Then he had it. The cannon shook into life, tongues of flash-fire dancing like an afterburner around the rotating multi-barrels. It roared out a great blurt of noise, undercut by the metallic grate of its cycling mechanism. A cascade of spent cases flew into the air and pattered down onto the ooze.
The cannon-blasts stripped away the vegetation before them, pulping it into matted, wet debris and a sticky mist of sap-vapour. The las-fire ceased abruptly.
"Go!" Molotch ordered. "Get to the camp!"
They all started to ran, splashing and tearing through the mulch and undergrowth. Molotch couldn't see Lynta at all. Emmings was in front. He was first out into the open glare.
"Come the frig on!" he shouted, turning back to wave at them.
Emmings' head snapped sideways, whip-cracking his reedy neck. The Shockwave travelled down his bony body and twisted it violently. Before his feet left the powder-white ground, his head began to deform, to wrench out of shape, to lose all semblance of Emmings. Then it burst, and Emmings folded like a snap-shut clasp knife. He fell sideways into the dust. Molotch glimpsed a lean figure with a bolt pistol duck back into cover behind one of the pillars. Just a glimpse, but Molotch recognized him.
That bastard interrogator, Thonius.
So, they'd found them. Thonius, his cronies - and their thrice-damned master.
Nung trampled clear of the undergrowth and peppered the nearest pillars with his cannon. Stone dust and quartz shrapnel blizzarded off them in a long, stippling line.
Molotch ran out beside him and pulled the blood-flecked pulse rifle out of Emmings' still-clenched hands.
"Where is he?" Lynta was behind him suddenly, her snub-las raised. "It was that rant-freak Thonius, wasn't it? I saw him."
"Over there..." Molotch pointed.
"Hose it!" Lynta yelled to Nung, and started to run.
Nung loved Lynta as much as he could love anything. He obeyed without hesitation, raking the pillars again and showering the ground with spent cases. The chalky impart spume wafted up, clouds into a cloudless sky.
Lynta disappeared behind the nearest pillars. Molotch started to move again. Kyband and Hehteng emerged from the jungle.
"The camp!" Molotch screamed at them. "Nung's with me!"
Kyband and the Lupen started to ran up the track. Hehteng used his backward-jointed, powerful limbs to leap ahead of the human.
Molotch edged down into the pillars. It was hot and quiet again suddenly. The sun glared down, almost overhead, and he ignored his pouring sweat and the burning of his skin. He'd lost his straw hat somewhere. He moved from shadow to shadow, hugging the scant shade at the base of the pillars. Nung shuffled after him. The ogryn's breathing was loud and ragged.
Abruptly, two figures whirled into view around the side of one of the columns: Lynta and Thonius. Somehow, they had disarmed one another. Their desperate combat was extraordinary, almost too fast for the eye to follow. Kick, jab, kick, evade, duck, slice, jab. Two perfectly trained killers unleashed. Molotch raised his rifle and tried to draw a bead on Thonius, but Nung knocked his aim aside. "Zygmunt hit her!" he wheezed.
It was true. He might. The combatants were a blur of circling bodies and scything limbs. There was no way to separate them.
