by Dan Abnett
The Sons struck with a cold certainty. Two more of Seddok’s troops were down, unmoving, but the others retaliated as he did. The armour of their opponents was strong, but it wasn’t enough. These soldiers were good, but they were not worthy of the Death Brigade. Seddok’s force nailed them against the barricade with fire, then closed the rest of the distance and hit with a wall of bayonets. Seddok drove his chainblade through the gorget’s hand and into the throat of the man before him. The warrior’s face was shadowed, scarred with the ritualised wounds of devotion, alive with hatred and the fever of blood. It was the mirror of his own, and it was a betrayal. The scars were related to his own. But they were not the same. There was allegiance to Khorne, but this was a disciple of a master other than the Gaur.
Every deviation could mean a loss to the serfs of the false god. For such weakness, there was no death painful enough.
The fight was over in seconds. The Sons of Sek lay sprawled, mutilated. No uniformity to them now. Only the variety of death, the wet gleam of viscera, the pooling scarlet of blood and the jagged white of bone. Now, Seddok thought, are you learning? This is the cost of schism. There was satisfaction in that thought.
But the enemy on the levels above and opposite continued to shoot. Crouching low, the Death Brigade backed away from the barricade, out of the angle of fire.
‘They were expecting us,’ Mevvax said.
‘How?’ Eshk protested.
‘How is irrelevant,’ Seddok told him. Mevvax was right. There was nothing improvised about this defence. It was too strong, too well prepared. The space of this work level had been cleared of debris, giving the Sons of Sek room to manoeuvre. The tools were stacked against the walls on either side. The conveyor belts and generators were idle.
Seddok remembered the sentries outside the manufactorum, and how they had looked so conveniently in the wrong directions.
Mevvax completed his thought. ‘This was a trap.’ She was glaring at him. She was close to challenging his leadership. A weak leader was a dead one. If he didn’t reclaim the initiative from the Sons of Sek, she would try to replace him.
‘And?’ he said. ‘What difference does that make?’ he asked the rest of the brigade. ‘We knew they would come. What point would there be if they didn’t? How would they be taught respect if we didn’t ram it down their throats?’ He moved to the centre of the level. Ladder rungs were mounted on an iron column that ran between the floors. ‘They’re waiting for us? Good.’
He pulled a frag grenade from his belt and tossed it down the shaft to the level below. He sheathed his chainsword and started climbing down as the grenade went off. He kept his pistol out and pointing down. He pulled the trigger, firing suppressive shots as soon as his feet passed through the ceiling. He was through and could see the Sons of Sek before they recovered sufficiently to coordinate fire.
He had a few seconds of high vulnerability. There was another squad’s strength below. Two had been killed in the explosion. The others were on the move, but there was no cover in the cleared interior of the work space. Seddok dropped another handful of rungs. Another grenade came through the opening above him. It struck the deck and bounced. It blew up in mid-air, shrapnel slashing out at neck level. One of the Sons staggered, clutching his face. Then Mevvax was through the ceiling, adding her fire to Seddok’s.
The etogaur jumped, falling the last few metres, still firing. The landing sent a violent jar up his spine, but he stayed on his feet. With his back to the column, he shot in a wide arc, keeping the initiative as he forced the Sons onto the defensive. They fired as they ran, encircling his position. He ignored the near misses and took his time, aiming well and firing for effect. Two more of the enemy lay dead when Mevvax reached the ground. By then, Eshk and Paraak were climbing down. The Blood Pact’s fire became more concentrated. The vulnerability of its warriors lessened. Kstah leapt straight through the opening and landed on one of the Sons, the impact snapping the man’s neck.
Before the full brigade was down, the Sons of Sek squad was reduced to five troopers. They knew they were dead. They stopped trying to evade the fire. Shouting the glory of Khorne, they grouped together. They could not survive, and so they worked to kill.
Though they were outnumbered, they dropped three more of Seddok’s command before they were cut to pieces.
There were two more levels before the Death Brigade would be on the manufactorum floor. From above, Seddok could hear the pounding of boots and the shouts as the Sons of Sek converged from the other decks. One squad at a time, they didn’t have the strength to be a threat. It enraged Seddok that the victories he had won so far came down to brute numbers rather than skill. That was not the lesson he had come to inflict. And now, having walked into a trap, a trap whose jaws were closing, he was faced with the possibility that it was the Blood Pact that was on the receiving end of the lesson.
The edges of his vision flared hot-white. Pride fuelled his rage to the point that he thought he might snap the planet in half with his hands. He rejected the lesson. He rejected the possibility of defeat. He rejected everything that did not involve wading thigh-deep through the blood of the Sons of Sek.
Most of all, he refused to consider the larger implications of the trap. He would negate them by rendering the trap futile. He would fulfil his mission. He would slake his rage.
Dread, wrath and his sworn vow flashed across his thoughts in the seconds between hearing the approaching troops and grasping the rungs to resume the descent.
Mevvax said, ‘This is a good way to erode our strength.’
‘We need to reach the floor,’ Seddok answered. He thought about shooting her before her challenge became direct. With an effort, he set the idea aside. The unity of the brigade was paramount. ‘You have a better way?’ He didn’t give her a chance to answer. ‘No. I didn’t think so.’ He threw another grenade down and started to climb. ‘With me!’ he barked.
The Sons on the next level were better prepared. Las-fire came for him the moment he appeared. He couldn’t move fast enough. He took a hit in the chest-plate. The armour absorbed the worst, but the hit damaged it badly, and he felt fire across his chest. Another bolt struck the column next to his hand. He kicked away from the column as he fell.
The drop was over five metres. He snarled as he arced towards his foe. He kept firing. The fall was just long enough for Seddok to experience the wind-whistling speed of flight, and the anticipatory dread of defeat. He bent his knees as he hit. He rolled into an impact that pounded his skeleton like a blade in a forge. He couldn’t breathe. Raging defiance kept him moving. He came out of the roll with the momentum of his fall and leapt into a Son of Sek. They both went down hard. The Son lost his rifle. He grabbed Seddok’s throat and squeezed hard. Seddok rammed his pistol into the Son’s face and fired. He pushed himself away from the smoking corpse as more grenades went off, and his troops joined the fight.
He still couldn’t breathe. His vision was blurred. He saw a shape before him. He fired, it fell, and he staggered upright, drawing his chainsword. He stumbled to the right, and the bayonet aimed for his heart struck his shoulder instead, piercing the armour through a seam. The pain shocked air into his lungs, clarity into his vision. He hissed, dragging the chainsword up. He severed the arms of the Son before him.
He moved back, towards the barricade, and tugged the blade from his shoulder. Before him, the fight was ending, decided again by numbers. The Sons of Sek were dead. So were more of his warriors. The brigade was at two-thirds’ strength, and he could hear the Sons’ reinforcements arriving on the deck above.
He was out of time. If he led the fight down to the final level, the struggle there would give the larger force the chance to catch up. Their only move was a desperate one.
An act of will. An object lesson for all.
‘With me,’ he said once more. He held Mevvax’s gaze, and she must have realised what he was planning, bec
ause she grinned. She had lost her grotesque in the fight, and when she pulled her lips back, her angular scars moved into each other, as if dozens of small, jagged mouths were echoing the expression.
Seddok’s limbs sent shooting pain through his frame. He had fractured some ribs. Rage at the prospect of defeat sustained him. Rage pushed him forward. It gave him strength and the necessary madness. He ran for the barricade and leapt over it, blind.
Rage would guide him to the blood of his enemies. Rage would give Khorne the great sacrifice.
There was no las-fire as he dropped. The Sons of Sek had all left their ambush positions and were pursuing in a single force. As Seddok fell to the floor of the manufactorum, he was assailed by a spiritual vertigo. He had been falling since the beginning of the assault, from greater and greater heights. He had a premonition that the next fall would not end, that it would be the terminal plunge into failure.
Down. Hard strike against the rockcrete floor. Absorbing the shock as best he could, but hearing cracks inside his body. There was something wrong with his feet when he stood. Pain was a deep splintering. He wouldn’t be able to run much further or much longer. That was all right. He didn’t have far to go. Wrath would sustain him. It coursed through his blood as he started to move, vaulting over cables to run parallel to cart tracks, leading the brigade to the great blast furnace.
Not all his warriors had survived the fall. Seddok glanced back. He saw two bodies on the ground. One of them was crawling. They were failures left behind for the Sons of Sek. The enemy hadn’t arrived yet. The Sons had not taken the leap. The snarl in Seddok’s throat was contempt and eagerness. He had the time he wanted. The lesson would be taught after all.
Kstah raced ahead. The loxatl showed no ill effects of the leap. The twin flechette blasters of the mercenary’s body vest fired a storm of monomolecular shards, slicing to ribbons any slaves who crossed their path. There was panic on all sides. Vehicles bearing massive loads of girders and hull plating were abandoned. Humanity in all its futility sought to flee its destiny as a feast for the Blood God. The fear gave Seddok still more energy. He would justify that fear.
The blast furnace loomed ahead. It was a squat titan, its massive, lantern-shaped body rising almost as high as the upper work levels of the manufactorum. Inside, heated to thousands of degrees, was a small lake’s worth of molten ore.
Seddok focused on the target. The furnace was his weapon. It was what he was charging towards. All true. Yet at the back of his mind, there was an outraged, humiliated wail that saw the race as a retreat, as a flight from a superior enemy.
They were within reach of the base of the furnace when the Sons of Sek struck. A wall of las fell on the Death Brigade. The Sons had created an unbroken assault line. They marched shoulder to shoulder across the floor. They climbed any obstacles for clear shots on the Blood Pact.
One of the Sons did not shoot. He stood atop a stack of girders several metres high, challenging the Blood Pact to make him a target. A scourger, Seddok guessed. He had heard the rumours: officers who spoke as if with the voice of Sek himself, driving their warriors to impossible feats of war. The gestures with which he directed his troops were imperious, even disdainful.
Of course they are, Seddok thought. These are not his elite soldiers. There are too many of them.
A point was being made. The Sons of Sek could take on the best of the Blood Pact with their most common forces.
The brigade returned fire. It was an act of symbolic defiance, a futile gesture that was swept aside by a massacre. The rear ranks fell immediately. The rest ducked beneath the huge bustle pipe that surrounded the furnace. It was a partial cover. It would buy a few more seconds.
Seddok reached the base. The heat from the furnace’s volcanic heart reached through his grotesque.
‘No one is leaving this battlefield,’ Paraak grunted as he and Mevvax joined him.
‘No one,’ Seddok agreed. ‘No one.’ He spat the words, a vow etched in acid. He pulled the melta bomb from his kit. So did the other two. ‘Not a single Son of Sek will walk out of this manufactorum.’
‘Nor will any sworn member of the Blood Pact.’
‘And?’
‘No one will know what we have done here.’
Seddok fixed the bomb to the base of the furnace. ‘And?’ he snarled. He didn’t care for messages or any other wider consideration now. His enemy was on the point of triumphing, and the only thing that mattered was robbing the Sons of their victory.
Mevvax grinned again. Her eyes glittered with predatory ferocity above her bloody rictus. She was not challenging him. She would vent her rage along with him. ‘And blood for the Blood God,’ she said to Paraak. She moved down the flank of the furnace. Paraak went the other way.
One melta bomb would be enough to pierce through. Three would ensure the Sons had no chance to react.
Behind Seddok, the fight was ending. There were only a handful of Blood Pact still remaining. The Sons of Sek were closing fast. They must have realised the lengths the Death Brigade was willing to go. Their rush to stop him gave Seddok his own victory.
He turned from the furnace. He saw Kstah atop the bustle pipe, firing down at the Sons. There was a supporting framework a few paces to Seddok’s left. He used it to climb to the top of the pipe. The Sons of Sek were a wave of wrath and perfect war heading his way.
‘Be ready now!’ he called down to Mevvax and Paraak.
‘We are,’ Mevvax answered, and Paraak gave his liquid laugh.
Seddok pulled the detonator from his belt. With his thumb on the trigger, he stood up, facing his opponent. Time to crack the world open, as he had known he could.
He pressed the button.
A savage light burst across the space of the manufactorum as the melta bombs ate through the furnace walls. They released its blood, its incandescent blood. It burned and drowned the last of the Blood Pact. It met the wave of the Sons of Sek with a different wave, a terrible wave, a wave of red and orange metal that scoured them from existence. The heat was a new sort of pain, sharp as a blade, brutal as a claw. In moments, Seddok’s grotesque heated to the point that it began to cook his flesh. Beside him, Kstah writhed, meat roasting on a spit.
Despite the pain, for a few seconds Seddok could still see. For a few seconds, the bustle pipe was above the flood.
And during those few seconds he roared. He howled his hatred of the Sons of Sek, at the traitors to the cause. He shrieked so hard and loud that he won another victory. He held the thoughts of greater failure at bay. If he thought of the larger questions of what would happen now, of how dangerous the Sons of Sek must be to see him coming and prepare the trap, he did not care. He had won.
But as the supports buckled, and the pipe tipped Seddok towards the greater pain, the blinding light of the sea of ore, he could no longer defend against the epiphany. On this day, there had been no messages, no lessons, and no victories. There was only a wound, deeper than any he had ever carved. A wound to the cause for which he had made of himself a burnt offering.
And back to me again.
This is my third and final ‘current Ghosts continuity’ story for this anthology. It is set three weeks after Salvation’s Reach, relates directly to my two previous stories in this volume, and also to Nik’s, and is a must-read if you’re going into The Warmaster next. Basically, and forgive me if you disagree, I don’t believe that anthologies should be optional extras. This story, like the others listed above, informs the ongoing storyline directly. You need to read it (and them) to fully appreciate The Warmaster. This isn’t an optional side order, this is essential. I hope you appreciate and agree with that philosophy. If I’m going to ask you to buy a Ghosts story, it had better matter. It had better be crucial. It had better not be skippable or disposable.
This isn’t. No matter what you think is going on by the end of the story, you’re wrong. But this is g
oing to come back and bite arses everywhere.
I’ve been building towards this for a long time. A long time. When was Necropolis published (2000? Well, tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999)?
I like long-term plot plans.
I like Gol Kolea a lot.
I also like turning mistakes into story points.
When you’re writing a long series of novels, you make mistakes. I’m sorry, but even the most thorough author slips up. When I make a mistake, I recognise my failing and seek to correct it (Space Wolves style). I turn the mistake into an asset. Merrt was shot in the mouth in Ghostmaker and ‘died’ (though I didn’t say so), but I wrote about him afterwards, forgetting his death. Realising that, I gave him an augmetic jaw, had him lose his marksmanship skills, and turned him into a major character. A compelling character, I hope. Through a continuity mistake, I found a great character (I fething miss him).
Bonin fell to his ‘death’ in Necropolis. I put him into the books after that, realised that I’d fethed up, and thus developed him into ‘Lucky Bonin’ and made my mistake an asset. Another character brought to life by authorial incompetence.
I made another mistake regarding Gol’s kids in the books following Necropolis… You see? A pattern emerges. I am turning yet another clumsy mistake into a plot point.
And a big one.
Truth is, I really shouldn’t be telling you all this. Revealing my mistakes and my frantic efforts to make them right, I mean. You should have a sense that an author is in complete control, that he knows everything, that he has been planning for a long time in intricate detail. I really, really shouldn’t be showing you how the sausages are made.
In writing this introduction, I was torn between two approaches. Pretend I was an infallible genius who had been developing secret subplots for years, or show you the craft (ha ha! ‘The craft’? Abnett, get over yourself!).