Salvation's Reach

by Dan Abnett

  Terek-8-10 adjusted the parameters of his auspex scan to include the xenobiological element.

  ‘Holy Throne of Terra,’ he breathed.

  The loxatl were pouring into the depot chamber via the ceiling vents, squirming down the girder work and vertical struts using their four grasping limbs and their tails, firing the murderous flechette blasters strapped to their bellies.

  The auspex already showed sixty-eight of them, and the number was increasing with every passing second.

  The assault ships of Strike Alpha followed the Caestus’s headlong rampage into the heart of the Reach. The outer hatch of the reassigned Primary Target had been disintegrated entirely. The Arvus and Falco craft had to close up and enter one or two at a time to avoid the jagged tatters of metal framing the mouth of the eviscerated docking bay.

  Decompression had stopped, so the air was free of flying debris. Generator fields had been re-established to seal the bay entrance, and each troop ship juddered as it popped the field edge and entered the contained atmosphere from hard space.

  ‘Stand by!’ the lead pilot sang out.

  The main docking bay was a disaster area. It looked as though a flash flood had sucked through it, washing debris to the mouth in a deep sediment of jetsam. That debris included whole landing ships and shuttle craft. The flash flood had been followed by a fire storm that had left most of the space ablaze.

  There was no way to set down.

  The Arvus pilots were following the tracer signal from the Caestus. It had punched through into the next chamber.

  ‘Throne, are we there yet?’ groaned Rerval.

  The inner dock was little better. The landers dropped speed again, circling towards the back of the chamber. The Caestus had smashed through into yet a third chamber, but this breach was too small and treacherously sharp for the thin-skinned lighters to risk navigating.

  ‘Setting down!’ the pilot yelled over the comm.

  The first Arvus dropped on its thrust-fans, wing profile adjusting for landing. It landed with a bruising thump on the buckled, debris-littered decking.

  The rear hatch dropped. Kolea, his rebreather up over his face, led the first squad out. He carried his lasrifle and a tall oblong boarding shield that looked like the lid of a coffin.

  It took him a moment to get his bearings. It had been dark and cramped in the back of the utility lifter. Now it was bright, glaringly bright, and the space around them was vast, a primary scale docking facility. The air was almost freezing cold, but the heat from the various monumental fires scorched his skin. Machines and cargo-handling rigs destroyed by the Caestus’s raid lay in their wake. Other ships were coming in through the smoke-wash and setting down behind Kolea’s lander.

  Rerval called out and indicated the source of the Caestus’s tracer signal. Up ahead of them, there was another puncture in the wall, like a giant bullet hole, where the Caestus had gone through into the next compartment. Kolea ran forwards. Underfoot were burning scraps, lumps of debris and splattered organics from the dock personnel mushed by the pressure shock of the Caestus’s strike.

  The puncture was big, but the lower lip was four metres off the deck level, and the edges were still glowing red hot. Getting through was going to be entertaining. Kolea looked for a hatch they could force – a blast door, an airgate…

  No time. Nothing in sight.

  ‘Storm it!’ he yelled. ‘Grab some debris for scaling ladders. Move your arses. Living forever is not an option today!’

  His squad broke away and gathered up sections of fallen gantry, dragging it over to the puncture. More sections were catching up with them, deposited by the next few landers. Baskevyl was among them. Kolea saw the concern in his eyes through the lenses of his breather mask.

  ‘We’ve got a problem,’ Baskevyl said.

  ‘The breach?’

  ‘Screw that, the landing. There’s no space!’

  Kolea assessed the options. There were now six lighters on the deck, and space for perhaps three more. The Falcos and longbodies coming in behind would soon be stacking up with no room to land.

  ‘We have to get the empties up and away,’ Kolea yelled to Baskevyl.

  ‘Agreed!’

  ‘Get the message through to the pilots,’ Kolea ordered. ‘They have to make room on the ground once they’ve discharged their complements, and the incomers have to make room in the air to let the outgoing pass through the dock area and get clear.’

  ‘We can’t keep them on station,’ said Baskevyl.

  ‘No, we can’t,’ Kolea agreed. ‘Good thing we plan on staying here, huh?’

  Baskevyl headed back towards the landing zone. Kolea joined his assault squad at the puncture. Under the supervision of Derin and Caober, sections of smouldering metal wreckage had been dragged up to the wall and hoisted to form makeshift scaling ramps into the puncture.

  ‘Is it safe?’ asked Kolea.

  Derin just laughed.

  ‘I know,’ replied Kolea. ‘Stupid question.’ He lifted his boarding shield and clambered onto the tubular frame, going up hand and foot. As assault commander, he wasn’t about to let anyone else show him how it was done.

  ‘Come on!’ he yelled at the men behind him. Most of them seemed particularly keen to help hold the debris steady.

  ‘You heard the major,’ Commissar Fazekiel yelled, arriving at a run from her transport. ‘Get up that ramp!’

  The Ghosts began to swarm up the girders behind Kolea.

  Kolea reached the summit, and gazed through the massive tear in the compartment wall. He could see the fires burning in the depot space beyond, feel the backwash heat. He could see the Space Marines across the vast floor. He could see what they were blasting at.

  ‘Oh, holy gak,’ he said.

  ‘They’re fething well waving them off!’ Costin exclaimed, his voice sounding dull and stupid inside his rebreather. ‘Look at them. Baskevyl’s just waving them off!’

  Meryn looked. He saw what Costin was talking about. E Company had just begun to deploy from their Falcos, and the landing zone was packed about as tightly as anyone would ever want. He could see Major Baskevyl and some of the other company officers signalling empty landers to lift off and clear the debris-strewn deck to make room for more.

  That meant if they needed to pull out in a hurry, there wouldn’t be enough transports waiting.

  ‘Gak, that’s just great,’ snapped Gendler.

  ‘I know! Fething marvellous, right?’ Costin agreed.

  Gendler didn’t reply. Meryn pretended to be too busy shouting at some laggards to get down the ramp.

  The truth was, Costin wasn’t their best friend right then and there. Just before load up and launch, he’d come to them, shit-scared about something Rawne had said. The pathetic idiot had just dumped it on them, right in the middle of the pre-combat build up and the stress that brought with it. Costin was a liability. He couldn’t handle a thing, least of all his drink any more. He was paranoid and raving. Best guess was Rawne had somehow sniffed out a trace of the sweet little deal they had been running. If that was true, then it sucked like a chest wound. It didn’t suck quite as much as the assault run they were now in the middle of, but in the long term – provided there was going to be a long term – it could potentially suck even worse. If ‘they’ did know, things could turn very ugly for Meryn and his close confederates.

  As ugly as Costin’s face.

  What had he done? What had the drunken shithead managed to do? How had he given them away? Loose talk over some sacra? Some dumb slip?

  Whatever it was, Meryn was sure of one thing. ‘They’ had Costin. Rawne wouldn’t have gone to Costin if he hadn’t known for sure Costin was in it. Otherwise, it was probably a fishing trip. Costin was probably all they had, because only Costin was stupid enough to give himself away, and even then he wasn’t stupid enough to blow the whole thing.

  Rawne was baiting. Rawne was counting on Costin being so panicked he’d do anything he could to save his neck.
r />   And he would. Costin always would.

  So if they made it out of the Reach alive, Meryn had some serious damage-control to manage.

  The rain of fire from the xenos became torrential. Flechette rounds detonated all around the advancing Space Marines in razorbursts. Eadwine felt ultra-sharp splinters slice off his armour. One actually punctured the ceramite. He felt it dig into the meat of his thigh. The sheer shot rate and penetrative effect of the loxatl blasters would finish them. Even three of the Adeptus Astartes would be brought to their knees, and then their deaths, by such a deluge.

  His shield was still up. Sighting down his boltgun, he began to blast up into the roof space, blowing out rigs and gantries. Debris rained down. He saw one writhing reptile body tumble and burst on the deck. Scans now showed close to one hundred and eighty loxatl flooding down into the chamber. Some were racing down the chamber walls to attack from the ground. Eadwine directed the fields of fire of the weapon servitors as they pushed forwards in the face of the onslaught.

  A large adult loxatl launched itself off an overhead gantry and dropped onto Holofurnace, dewclaws extended to slash. Holofurnace caught the animal on his shield and smashed it aside. It bounced off the deck, rolling, its blaster harness torn so that flechette ammunition scattered loose. Switching around, Sar Af put a single bolt through the loxatl’s skull before it could rise. Its brain matter splattered across the deck, and its massive, blue-grey trunk and tail went into muscle spasms.

  Another leapt. Sar Af blew it in half in the air. A third came down. Holofurnace had clamped his boltgun and drawn his spear off his back. He threw himself forwards to meet the close combat attack, decapitating the third loxatl with his circling spear blade.

  ‘Ithaka!’ the Iron Snake yelled.

  The next loxatl to come at him lost its front limbs at the elbow joints in one fluid slice. The one after that died from an impaling wound. The next, which attacked as Holofurnace was ripping his spear out of his previous kill, had its back broken by a backhand smash of the Iron Snake’s boarding shield.

  It was something, but it was only a start. Auspex now showed two hundred and seventy-one xenos contacts in the chamber. There were so many coming down the roof pylons they were pushing the front runners off the hand holds, forcing them to drop, claws out, onto the Space Marines. Sar Af slugged them out of the air with bolt rounds, blowing open skulls and ribcages, severing whip tails, showering the fight zone with meat and viscera. Then two flechette rounds hit his right shoulder guard almost simultaneously and drove him down onto one knee.

  Terek-8-10 raised the Caestus into the air behind them, ramps still gaping open. He got the damaged craft up to about eight metres, and swung it in over the heads of the advancing Space Marines. The armoured bulk of the Caestus formed a hefty shield, soaking up the majority of the blaster fire that had been raking the Space Marines and their servitors. In its shadow, Eadwine saw that the deck plates were peppered and grazed by the flechette fire to such an extent they resembled a lunar surface. The deck was also littered with bloody xenos meat and slimy, plum-coloured organs.

  Flechette fire raked the Caestus. Loxatl dropped on to it, leaping down onto the hull booms, gripping onto the ragged wings. Some fell. Others clung on. They swarmed over the upper surface. Terek-8-10 retracted the open ramps, but several of them had already slithered inside, like lizards skipping across a rock in the sun. He could hear them skittering and chirring inside the vacated compartments. He could smell the stink of rancid milk and crushed mint that oozed from their flesh and breath. Another animal scrambled up the hull fairing right in front of him, and started firing its blaster point blank at the little armoured window port in front of the pilot’s position. After eight frenetic shots, the armoured glass actually began to craze.

  Terek-8-10 switched to manual control and began to swing the Caestus around. The increase in thrust sucked air into the atmospheric intakes, and the loxatl on the fairing was dislodged. It ripped past him, claws squealing on the metal, shrieking an inhuman scream as its tail and one hind leg vanished into the intake.

  Terek-8-10 could hear the loxatls already aboard breaking through the compartment hatches under his position. The sickening stink of bad milk grew stronger. He adjusted the ram attitude again, tilting it more steeply, trying to train the magna-melta on the gantries overhead.

  He got a decent angle.

  ‘Cover yourselves,’ he voxed.

  Below the ram, the Space Marines backed off, shields raised.

  Terek-8-10 had enough power in the heat cannon for three more decent shots. He fired. Part of the overhead girderwork exploded, and droplets of molten metal rained down. The melta blast torched loxatl into blackened, shrivelled shreds that roasted off the gantries like scraps of burning paper.

  He fired again. A huge section of the roof gantry, on fire and covered with burning loxatl, fell away, and glanced off the ram on its way to the chamber floor.

  The creatures on board were in, right below him. They had torn open the compartment hatches. They fired up into the roof of the stowage bay and razor shrapnel from the flechette rounds burst through the floor of the pilot’s position, shredding Terek-8-10’s legs and groin. He felt the ice-pain of tiny hypervelocity metal shards travelling up through his torso, bursting organs, severing augmetics, and liquidising blood vessels. He felt them in the sacs of his hearts. He felt his lungs collapsing. Blood filled his throat. The loxatl underneath his position, chattering and squealing, kept shooting, blasting shot after shot up into the pilot’s position.

  With his last double heartbeat, the pilot-servitor triggered the afterburners.

  Kolea’s eyes opened wide. It was one of those sights he would never forget. He’d seen some things in his life as a Guardsman, seen some things before that too. This was a new brand on his memory.

  He saw the Space Marines’ boarding ram, the Caestus, damaged and blackened, crawling with loxatl. He saw it tilt, nose up, pointing at the tangled, complex ceiling structure of the depot chamber, a structure that was dripping with xenos. The loxatl were spilling out of the roof space like maggots out of bad meat.

  Kolea was at the top of the makeshift scaling ladder, poised on the lip of the puncture hole. His men were behind him, yelling at him to go on, jump down, make way for them. He had to stick out his hand to steady himself. The ragged metal lip of the hole was hot.

  ‘What can you see?’ Rerval was yelling, from the girder behind him. ‘Major, what can you see?’

  He could see the tilted Caestus, engines pulsing, a writhing mass of loxatl across its upper hull, some falling off, tails lashing. He could see the Space Marines and their weapon servitors on the floor of the chamber below, blasting at the grey reptiles as they rushed in from all sides.

  He could smell rancid milk and crushed mint.

  ‘Major?’

  Kolea watched as the Caestus shuddered. It fired up at the ceiling vault, bringing down huge chunks of machinery in showers of flame and sparks. Burning loxatl dropped like comets. It fired again. A massive pylon cylinder broke free of its ceiling mount and came crashing down, strung with fracturing gantries and doomed loxatl. The huge structure, streaming smoke and flames, barely missed the Caestus as it fell. It hit the chamber floor so hard that Kolea felt the shockwave shake the girders he was standing on. It almost crushed one of the Space Marines, the towering Silver Guard Eadwine.

  Eadwine hurled himself full length to avoid the impact. He landed in the midst of recoiling loxatl, and immediately had to kill them to protect himself. The pylon cylinder toppled after the impact, and fell on its side with a second crash that kicked up sparks and a blizzard of burning scraps. It rolled, burning.

  The Caestus was almost overwhelmed. Its afterburners lit. The rockets roared with scorching white heat. Laden with loxatl, the ram accelerated up into the roof.

  That’s when the real shockwave came. Kolea felt it in his lungs. He felt it punch his ribcage. He felt it hammer the deck and the compartment walls. He felt
it knock his legs away.

  The Caestus tore into the vault, triggering a vast fireball that ripped through the ceiling structures, destroying them. Macerated, burning loxatl were hurled in every direction. The expanding fireball, a rolling wave, lapped out across the ceiling of the vault and down the walls. Falling, Kolea felt the heat of it.

  Wrecked but essentially still in one piece, the Caestus fell back out of the roof, bringing the ceiling down with it. Energy crackled and sparked like lightning around one of its twisted engine sections. A ramp door tumbled off. The air was full of flames.

  The collapsing wreckage hit the chamber floor with a numbing crash.

  Kolea hit the floor too. The blast had smacked him off the girder into the depot chamber. He jumped up, dazed, gazing at the devastation ahead of him.

  ‘Major. Major Kolea. Respond!’ Rerval was yelling over the link.

  ‘Get in here!’ Kolea yelled back. ‘C Company get in here. Now!’

  He raised his weapon and ran forwards. Behind him, Ghosts were leaping in from the rim of the puncture.

  Eadwine got up, throwing wreckage aside. A loxatl reared up at him, and he killed it with a headshot.

  ‘Status!’ he demanded over his helmet link.

  ‘Alive!’ the voice of Sar Af snapped back, a vox crackle.

  Holofurnace didn’t answer, but Eadwine knew that was because the Iron Snake always had something better to do. Eadwine could see him, thirty metres away across the piled and burning rubble, fighting at close quarters with a dozen of the surviving loxatl. Holofurnace’s spear circled and stabbed, killing them one by one, leaving arcs of xenos blood in the air behind it.

  According to Eadwine’s visor display, they had lost one of the gun servitors, crushed under the fall. Regrettable, but an acceptable loss. He activated his helmet’s vox-record.

  ‘Note for posterity,’ he said, turning to despatch another pair of lunging reptiles. ‘The selfless sacrifice and attention to duty of–’