by Dan Abnett
Eadwine paused, shooting out the spine of a leaping loxatl. He couldn’t remember which ancient pilot servitor had been assigned to the Caestus for the mission. It would be on file. He would amend the citation later.
Eadwine clambered forwards. Two flechette rounds punched his shield. He turned and fired a bolt round that detonated a xenos head.
Ahead of him, beyond the strewn wreckage, he saw that the White Scar had made it to the far exit of the depot chamber. Cunning and shrewd, Sar Af was always moving, always looking for a path.
There were loxatl all around the old bastard.
Eadwine ran a couple of steps, and leapt off a pile of steaming scrap metal. Despite the added weight of his revered boarding armour, the bound cleared a significant distance. He landed, leaping again, and came down a short distance behind Sar Af.
As he made this second landing, Eadwine cleared three targets with killshots. Sar Af turned, smacked a loxatl aside with his shield, and stamped on its neck to kill it.
‘You moved ahead,’ said Eadwine. ‘We cannot cover each other if we are too widely spaced.’
‘There are matters to attend to,’ Sar Af relied. ‘They will not wait.’
‘They will wait forever if you are dead,’ replied Eadwine. ‘The creatures defending this site are reacting with surprising speed to our attack.’
‘If your throat is cut,’ said Sar Af, ‘it does not matter how fast you react. We must get on and cut the throat.’
Sometimes, there was no arguing with brothers of the Fifth. Holofurnace, still locked in close combat behind them, seemed determined to methodically kill every single Archenemy in Salvation’s Reach one by one. The White Scar, however, appeared quite content to leave them all standing provided he could cut ahead and decapitate their command structure.
Both were respectable combat ethics. They were entirely incompatible. That was why Eadwine had charge of the mission.
‘We move ahead,’ he said. ‘We stay together.’
Sar Af nodded.
Eadwine activated his helmet link.
‘Strike Alpha lead to Guard formation. Are you deployed?’
‘Confirm, lead.’
‘Who speaks?’
‘Major Kolea, Tanith First.’
‘Where are you, Kolea?’
‘Scaling the breach now, advancing into the depot compartment.’
‘You need to close the gap. We are pressing forwards. Be advised, a high density of loxatl mercenaries are present. Are you familiar with loxatl, major?’
‘Yes, lead. We’re just a few minutes behind you and progressing rapidly.’
‘Very good. Lead out.’
Eadwine and Sar Af turned to the hatchway. The White Scar had just finished two more loxatl. Alien blood spattered his pearl-white plate.
Charges took out the hatch. In a fog of blue smoke, Sar Af and Eadwine advanced, shields raised, bolters propped over the right-angled corners. Holofurnace was closing at their heels.
They moved into a hallway, a main access way. There was blood and wreckage on the floor where personnel had fled the ram strike and sealed the hatch behind them. The structure and age of the walls and ceiling, and the machine components fixed into them, was such that it looked like the corridor had been built from scrap cannibalised from several different starships.
Shots started to snap at them. Holofurnace had joined them, his spear at his shoulder, his bolter back in his fist. They formed a line, three abreast, shields up. A moving wall, resilient and formidable, they advanced, almost filling the corridor from side to side.
The gunfire smacked into their rigidly held shields. It wasn’t xenos fire from some exotic flechette blaster. It was las-shot.
Up ahead, the first human defenders appeared, blasting down the smoky corridor with lasrifles and helguns.
Shields up, the Space Marines walked into it, blasting as they came. The mass reactive rounds streamed away from them and cut the hallway apart. Bodies fell. Wall panels blew out. Parts of the ceiling caved in.
The firefight exchange grew more intense.
The Space Marines didn’t slow down for a second.
The Ghosts of Strike Alpha pushed forwards across the depot through a jumble of burning debris. Zhukova reported that her company had engaged with some loxatl and were in the process of subduing them, though the bulk of the loxatl force had been wiped out by the Space Marine spearhead.
Kolea wondered if there would be more. He wondered what other wretched things lay in wait in the junk habitat.
He heard the heavy .30 crank up and start to fire. Bool and Mkan were getting busy. What the gak had they seen?
‘Hostiles!’ Caober yelled over the link. The scout had pushed forwards to the left-hand edge of the chamber. Kolea hefted his shield up and started to run. The shields had barrel slots cut in the top right-hand corner of their shapes, so the wearer could carry the shield on his left arm and brace the weight of his lasrifle barrel across the slot. Effectively, he could fire from behind cover. Kolea hadn’t used a boarding shield in combat before, but they’d been training hard en route. He still believed they were cumbersome and ineffective.
He was running forwards with five or six other Ghosts, leaping blazing debris. A crippled loxatl flopped out of hiding into their path and ratcheted off two shots with its flechette. Kolea’s shield stopped the first, and the second blew up against the deck. Derin’s shield saved his legs and groin from the deflected splinters of shrapnel. Firing from behind his shield, Kolea slew the loxatl with a burst of shots.
His attitude towards the boarding shields warmed slightly. In the enclosed space of boarding action, the danger of deflection shots was dramatically increased.
More gunfire streaked their way. Kolea saw what Caober had spotted. Sally ports had opened on the far side of the depot chamber: heavy trapdoor hatches concealed along the welded line where the bulkhead wall met the deck. Archenemy troops were clambering out of them, firing as they came. Kolea wasn’t sure if the hatches had been deliberately designed for defensive actions, or if the enemy was making smart use of engineering crawl spaces.
All he was sure of was that they were suddenly taking heavy fire against their left flank.
The enemy troops were big, human males. Their battle dress was not uniform, but it was all the same general mix of richly ornamented armour plate and yellow breeches and coats. Boots, gloves, belts, armour clasps and bindings, along with packs and webbing, were made of a dark, rich leather, polished a caffeine brown like mahogany. The leatherwork, especially the wide and heavy waist belts, was interwoven with purple silk bindings and silver wire stitching. The yellow of the material under the brown leather wargear was hot and acid, like a fusion beam. The warriors had tight, buckle-on metal helmets covered in brown leather that had incorporated visors: narrow, single-lens oblong frames that covered both eyes and emitted a dark blue glow. The buckled chinstraps of the helmets, fashioned from the same dark brown leather as the belts and webbing, were oversized, and designed in the form of life-sized human hands that covered the entire mouth area below the nose.
Kolea knew what he was seeing. Servants of the wretched anarch, whose voice ‘drowns out all others’, demonstrated respect for their master by covering their mouths.
These warriors were Sons of Sek.
EIGHTEEN
The First Cut
The shrieking of the Hades drill was becoming unbearable. Gaunt felt as if his teeth were about to shatter. The atmosphere in the lateral holdspace was thick with exhaust fumes and the reek of burning metal and oily water. A fine vibration, transmitted through the deck by the drill, was making everything tremble.
He retreated to just outside the hold hatchway so he could hear Beltayn over the vox.
‘Major Baskevyl reports six companies deployed at the primary zone,’ Beltayn said. ‘More coming in, but it’s tight.’
‘Have they kicked the door in and made a lot of noise?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Beltayn.
/> ‘Opposition?’
‘Loxatl. Now Major Kolea reports contact with what he believes are Sons of Sek.’
Gaunt took a deep breath. Loxatl made his skin crawl, but Sons of Sek were something else. The anarch’s rumoured response to Gaur’s Blood Pact. Sworn soldiers, cult devotees of the Ruinous Powers, yet disciplined and organised. Zealot warriors. Gaunt felt a particular type of fear whenever the Archenemy appeared to operate with intent. Their unpredictable insanity was bad enough. But for the Blood Pact, the Sabbat Worlds Crusade would have been prosecuted and done years before.
‘Keep me appraised,’ he said.
He suddenly realised the drill had shut up.
‘We’re through,’ said Mkoll.
Gaunt walked back into the hold. Servitor crews were pulling back the protective baffles. The troop company of Strike Beta was on its feet.
Gaunt waved the lead team forwards. Mkoll, Domor, Larkin and Zered. Each one carried the tools of his trade. They buckled on rebreathers and adjusted lamp packs.
The chief artificer was staring at Gaunt, waiting.
Gaunt took the vox horn from the set operator.
‘This is Strike Beta,’ he said. ‘Be advised, we are beginning insertion. Hull is breached, repeat, hull is breached.’
‘The Emperor protect you,’ Spika’s voice replied over the link.
Gaunt nodded to the chief artificer. The man turned and beckoned urgently with both hands. With a mechanical grumble, the Hades backed into the hold again, treads clattering on the deck. Its retreat unplugged the hole it had bored, a huge tunnel in the hull of the Reach the size of a decent hatchway. The edges of the cut were bright silver metal, whorled and flaked like shredded foil. Approaching, Gaunt could see the cut was under four metres deep. Cold and undisturbed air leaked out towards him from the darkness inside, like the slow bleed of heat from a tomb.
Artificers and servitors were fussing around the hole with tanks of sealant.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Gaunt.
‘The edges will be razor-sharp in places,’ replied the chief artificer, ‘hazardous to touch. We are preparing to seal them with–’
‘No time,’ said Gaunt. ‘We’ll just be careful.’
The artificer’s crew backed off.
Mkoll and Domor led the way, and Gaunt fell in behind them with Larkin. Zered brought up the rear, his flamer lit.
Gaunt drew his boltpistol. Larkin carried the old solid-round rifle he had been training with. His longlas was in its cover across his back.
Mkoll stepped forwards into the gloom, lasrifle ready. Beside him, Domor adjusted his headphones and extended the sweeper broom of his detector set. Gaunt could hear the sweeper’s little portable auspex ticking like a radiation counter.
They advanced down the cut, through the bored hole, carefully avoiding the razor-sharp sides. The skin of the hulk was dense and thick. Light from the hold winked off the milled and sawn edges of the tunnel.
Beyond lay darkness and silence.
They moved slowly. Even by Mkoll’s wary and calculated standards, they were being cautious. Gaunt’s eyes slowly began to adjust to the gloom.
A greyish half-light was revealed ahead of them, a dusk. They were coming through into a cavity that had the dimensions of a hold space, but none of the regularities. The ceiling sloped down at one end. This wasn’t a space that had been designed, it was a chamber that had been partially crushed into its current shape: the internal compartment of one of the ancient vessels that had fused to form the Reach, deformed by slow gravitational pressure.
The deck was uneven. Panels had popped their rivets and sat like displaced flagstones. Cables, ancient and powerless, hung down from busted roof plates. The air was ominously dry. Gaunt noticed that Zered’s flamer began to suck hard, and the trooper had to adjust the mix rate to compensate for the oxygen-poor atmosphere.
Domor swept steadily to and fro, passing his broom across the walls and low ceiling. Gaunt could see the blue glow of his set’s display screen. The ticking was steady.
‘Anything?’ he asked.
‘I’m calibrating,’ said Domor. ‘There’s a lot of bounce. So many different densities and intermixed alloys.’
Gaunt didn’t envy Domor’s task. A quick look at the walls and ceiling showed extraordinary levels of gross compaction, with structural fabric and mechanisms crushed along with circuits and energy filaments into scrap filler. Getting any meaningful discrimination through the auspex was going to be a challenge.
‘Steady,’ said Mkoll. They climbed over a fallen beam and ducked around a fractured metal arch, the remains of some giant hatch, which stuck up out of the mangled deck like a broken tooth. Mkoll waited while Domor scanned both, and marked them with yellow chalk as items to be cleared from the route. Beyond the arch, the compartment seam had ruptured open like a scar. The metal looked molten. Through the rupture lay a service-way.
They went through. The service-way was long, and only slightly deformed. It was wide and high enough to drive a cargo-6 along. It had been built for humanoids, but not by any human. Curious designs along the wall sections had been defaced and over-marked by Archenemy sigils.
‘This area’s in use,’ said Mkoll. ‘The dust on the deck shows footprint scuffs. Not recent. I’d say six months, though environmental conditions are so stable, it could be six years.’
‘Or six hundred,’ said Larkin.
‘They come this way often enough. They didn’t like looking at these markings,’ said Domor, nodding at the defaced walls. ‘They scratched them out, changed them.’
‘Or altered them to leave instructions of their own,’ said Gaunt. ‘Like “Keep out”. Check the deck. Wires, anything.’
Mabbon Etogaur had been quite specific about the ways in which the extremities of the Reach were protected. No wards or warp magic, no infernal devices or daemonic mechanisms. Anything like that might be too easily triggered by the sensitive study and development being undertaken at the facility.
At the Reach, the Archenemy was relying on good, old-fashioned mechanical booby traps: mines, explosives, lethal anti-personnel defences.
Domor scanned ahead, adjusted his settings, and then did it again.
‘Nobody breathe,’ he said. ‘I’m getting something now. The deck plates ahead are hollow. Wait… yes, feth. I’ve got cables, active-fluid hydraulics and an electric charge. We’ve got a pressure trigger. The deck’s live.’
Mkoll pulled a scope that matched the one screwed to the top rail of Larkin’s rifle. The chief scout put it to his eye, and Larkin raised his weapon, hunting.
‘Cable wire comes out eight metres down, to the left,’ said Domor.
‘I see it,’ said Mkoll. ‘That look like storage drums to you?’
‘In the alcove?’ asked Larkin, squinting through his rifle scope. ‘Yes, it does.’
‘The sniffer’s getting fyceline and promethium gel,’ said Domor. ‘About a tonne volume.’
‘Throne,’ said Zered, genuinely appalled.
‘Detonator?’ asked Gaunt.
‘Looking for it now,’ said Mkoll, training his scope. He had it set to low light. ‘Got it. I see the trigger pin. The cable’s cleated up the wall along the bulkhead seam. It goes in at the top of the left-hand drum.’
‘Yes, I see it,’ said Larkin, aiming.
Gaunt wondered if they should back off. The target was tiny and the light levels were poor, but eight metres was comfortably within Larkin’s effective range. If the shot failed, and the device detonated, no amount of shelter or cover would save them. A tonne of fyceline compound explosive would create an overpressure blast in the confined environment that would suck through the narrow apertures of the compartments, pulp their internal organs to soup and their bones to jelly, and probably burst the improvised atmosphere seal between the Armaduke and the Reach. Even the rest of Strike Beta, waiting in the later hold, would probably be killed by focused atmospheric concussion.
Hiding in cover when Lark
s took the shot might make them feel better, but it would have zero practical safety value.
‘Let’s get this done,’ said Gaunt.
Larkin knelt on one knee, settling his position, shaking out his shoulders. He chambered a single saline round, slammed it home, and then took his aim. Mkoll crouched beside him, and activated the passive tagger on his scope, so that the pencil-thin light beam indicated the precise target. As shot caller, Mkoll wanted to make sure he and Larkin were both appreciating and agreeing upon the same exact spot.
‘Got it,’ said Larkin, locking up his scope.
Domor lowered his broom and murmured a silent prayer. Zered hooked his flamer head to his waist belt and, to Gaunt’s amusement, put his hands over his ears.
‘None of you were actually planning on living forever, were you?’ Larkin asked.
He took the shot.
There was a dull, distant boom. It was muffled, but big. It resounded through the thick, deep hull of the Armaduke.
In preparation seventeen, a dingy cargo hold space, Blenner heard it and looked up. Some of the Ghosts around him had also noticed the noise.
‘What the hell was that?’ asked Wilder.
Blenner looked at Ree Parday. She’d been looking pale ever since they’d kitted up earlier in the day.
‘Go ask, would you?’ he asked.
Perday jumped off the wheel arch of the Tauros where she’d been sitting and ran towards the main hatch.
Blenner looked around the chamber. Three companies of the regiment, including the marching band, had been placed as combat reserve under the command of Captain Obel, with Captain Wilder as his second. In full combat gear, they were standing to in the hold space ready to deploy as required. They had eighteen Tauros assault vehicles ready and laden with spare munitions, with further re-stocks prepared on cargo pallets. If the word came, they could deliver munitions by truck down the Armaduke’s main spinal to either of the lateral holds, and even cross into the Reach via the bore holes to support Strikes Beta or Gamma. Alternatively, they could transport the munitions to the main excursion to reload the Arvus lighters and other drop ships if Alpha needed reinforcement or replenishment.
