by Dan Abnett
Two consequences were clear. Sek’s ambitions had to be stopped. The anarch was so capable that, if finally granted the supreme authority of Archon, he would make the continued prosecution of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade unviable. The Imperium would be forced to retreat and perhaps suspend operations entirely.
More particularly, what better result could the Imperium hope for than to have the fragile partnership of Archon and anarch fracture, and for Gaur and Sek to turn upon each other?
From time to time, Spika glanced at the slowly rotating schematic of Salvation’s Reach projecting up from the main table of the strategium display. As they approached, actual detector readings over-mapped and refined the plans. So far, Mabbon’s intelligence was remarkably precise.
Spika wondered how precise. What might be missing? What might have changed? Mabbon claimed to have visited the facility three times as part of the Sons force, and his memory engram of the structure had been copied from confidential files in the Palace of the Anarch. Details might have altered since then.
Ranged scanning had already indentified the three surface sites, preselected for the strike points: Alpha, Beta and Gamma.
A further question occurred to the shipmaster. It was actually one that had nagged him for days, and which he had been reluctant to voice.
The mission’s credibility rested upon the belief that Mabbon Etogaur had defected back to the Imperial cause; that after taking a path from which there should have been no return, he had rediscovered his loyalty to the Imperium, and brought to them, as an act of contrition and recompense, the means to cripple and disarm their greatest present foe.
What if his defection had simply been back to the Blood Pact, and he was now manipulating the Imperium into doing Urlock Gaur’s dirty work by taking out his chief rival?
Gaunt buckled on his belt, checked his boltpistol, and slotted it into the holster. He finished buttoning up his tunic and then started to fasten on his sword belt.
Maddalena came out of the bedchamber. She had dressed in some expensive, lightweight and ornate partial combat armour.
‘You’re not coming along,’ said Gaunt.
‘I know, but if the fight spills this way, I want to be ready.’
She looked at Gaunt’s power sword. It was clamped in its rack on top of the locker, ready to fit into the scabbard: the power sword of Heironymo Sondar, an emblem of Vervunhive and the great Verghast victory against the Ruinous Powers.
‘You should show him that,’ she said.
‘Felyx?’
‘Yes. You should show him that sword. Explain what you did to get it.’
‘He already knows,’ said Gaunt.
‘Of course he does,’ she said, ‘but that doesn’t mean it’s not important for him to hear you tell it.’
Gaunt took down the sword, activated its field briefly, felt the throb of its power, then deactivated it and sheathed it.
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ he said.
There was a knock at the cabin door. Gaunt had begun to enjoy the way Maddalena’s hand went for a weapon at the slightest cue, hardwired to fight and protect.
‘Get in the bedroom,’ he told her.
She raised her eyebrows.
‘I really don’t think we have time,’ she said.
He laughed, though it felt like too serious a time. She got up and disappeared.
Gol Kolea was waiting at the door, in full kit, weapon slung. His salute let Gaunt know it was an official visit.
‘Regiment battle ready and correct, sir,’ he said. ‘Strike Alpha is assembled on the main excursion deck. Strike Beta awaits you in lateral hold sixteen. Strike Gamma is assembled in lateral hold thirty-nine.’
‘Thank you, major. Time on target?’
‘Estimate is now five hours sixteen, sir.’
‘Have the shipmaster informed we stand ready.’
‘I will.’
‘Anything else to report, Gol?’
Kolea shook his head.
‘The mood’s good,’ he said. ‘I mean, everything considered. All the build-up, the extremity of it. I think the Ghosts have been out of the fight too long. For some, it’s been so long they thought they’d never march again. We need this.’
‘We need to win this,’ said Gaunt.
‘Of course, sir. That’s always true. In the grand scheme of things, we need to win this. But for us, for the regiment, we just need to do it, win or lose. We have to get bloody again or we’ll be good for nothing.’
Gaunt nodded.
‘Point taken. I think we’re ready to get bloody.’
Kolea nodded at Gaunt’s power sword.
‘You might let the boy take a look at that sometime.’
Gaunt frowned sharply. Kolea held up his hands peaceably.
‘I know, I know,’ Kolea said. ‘I’m hardly the one to be handing out advice on being an effective father.’
‘It’s not that,’ said Gaunt. ‘Have you been talking to someone?’
‘No.’
‘You’re not the first person to say that to me.’
Kolea shrugged.
‘The Ghosts haven’t taken to the boy yet, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s a little strange for them, to be honest. But I think they will. I think they’ll respect him because he’s yours. But I think you need to show them you respect him too.’
Gaunt didn’t reply. He put on his cap and picked up his gloves.
‘I’ll walk down with you and inspect the assemblies,’ he said.
Kolea looked back into the apparently empty cabin and pointed with his chin.
‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye first?’ he asked.
Gaunt was forced into a half-smile.
‘Not much gets past you, does it, Gol?’
Kolea laughed.
‘I’m not disapproving, sir. Not my place. And she’s a handsome woman.’
‘She’ll also be here when I get back,’ said Gaunt. He closed the cabin door behind him and set off along the hallway with Kolea.
‘That’s what I like to hear,’ said Kolea. ‘Confidence.’
‘That she’ll still be there?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That you know you’re coming back.’
The sheer scale of the debris mass became clearer as they approached. The Armaduke was just a speck, a speck amongst billions of specks surrounding the vast bolus of material. Salvation’s Reach was a planetoid, a veritable planet, except that its mass was not spherical. It was a colossal lumpen ingot, flattening out to a disk form at its extremities, where gravity had moulded it.
Through the outer scopes and telepicts, Spika resolved surface detail akin to some ork ships he’d encountered. Except it was put together with less precision. He saw a compressed jumble of mechanical material, like machines mangled and intermingled by an industrial compactor. There were canyons and ravines, sharp peaks and plateaux, deep fissures and almost smooth plains of hull fabric. Swimming through the dense swarms of loose junk, the Armaduke found itself slipping through floating slicks of promethium and other liquids and particulates, substances that had seeped out of the main mass and bled into space.
Lateral holds sixteen and thirty-nine were situated about two-thirds of a kilometre apart on the port side of the Armaduke. They both had large armoured outer hatches equipped with atmospheric field generators. Prior to departure from Menazoid Sigma, the hatch surrounds of both hold apertures had been reinforced and built out with vulcanised buffer collars.
Spika initiated the final approach. Apart from orbital drydocks, the Armaduke had never been positioned this close to a larger object. It felt counterintuitive to him, though every system was green. A shiftship was built for the freedom of the open void, not to snuggle in against the outer layers of a megastructure, like a tick on the skin of a grox. Spika had been obliged to cancel and mute all the proximity alarms, and fundamentally adjust the ship’s inertial stability to counteract the gravimetric load. The ship itself seemed to sense that the manoeuvre was wrong. Like Spika, the Ar
maduke was reluctant, as if it felt it was being deliberately crashed into the surface of a planet. The hull frame creaked and groaned uneasily. Burn corrections became hair’s breadth subtle.
With a dull and protracted rumble, and an eerie screech of scraping hull that shuddered through the ship and seemed to issue from some immense, echoing cavity, the Armaduke settled against the skin of the Reach.
Spika killed the drives and correction thrusters. He activated the magnetic clamps and inertial anchors.
He turned to Beltayn.
‘Inform your commander that the mission may now proceed,’ he said.
In lateral holds sixteen and thirty-nine, artificer crews scrambled towards the outer doors, erecting protective screens and baffles around what would be their workspace. Several of them waited for the indicator lights on the control panels of the atmospheric field generators to show green. In order to assure the results, they anointed the panels and uttered the correct propitiations. Processors hummed and throbbed. Machinery was rolled forwards in front of the hatch gates, and power cables were played out. Servitor crews advanced and stood ready with pressure hoses that fed from the water reservoirs inside the Armaduke’s hullskin, water that was dark and sludgy with ice.
Behind the protective barriers in the main body of each holdspace, assembled with their equipment and weapons, the strike teams sat and waited. Some spoke quietly, some rechecked their kit or specialist equipment, some muttered blessings to themselves or smoked lho-sticks, some caught catnaps.
Some watched the artificers at work. The Ghosts were dubious. This wasn’t their field of specialism. Every now and then, some pained metallic squeal would echo through the ship, a grinding shriek from where the cruiser’s hull rested against the bulk of the scrap-metal world they had docked against. Ghosts jumped, made the sign of the aquila, and looked around for the source of the noise.
Just over twenty long, edgy minutes after the Armaduke snuggled itself in against the Reach, tell-tales flashed green in lateral sixteen and thirty-nine almost simultaneously. Gaunt had just arrived in sixteen, where Strike Beta had assembled. At a nod from the chief artificer, Gaunt took a handset from the waiting vox-officer and called through to Major Pasha in lateral thirty-nine.
‘We have green here,’ she reported.
‘Fields stabilised,’ Gaunt agreed. ‘Give the order to open your hatch.’
‘The Emperor protects,’ Petrushkevskaya replied.
Gaunt looked at the chief artificer.
‘Open,’ he said.
The chief artificer nodded, turned and signalled to the bay gallery, where cargo officers activated the hatch gate controls.
There was a gentle clatter. Gaunt turned, and saw that Strike Beta had risen to its feet, en masse, weapons ready.
He knew full well that an almost identical scene was playing out in lateral thirty-nine.
There was thump, a hiss of compression seal pistons, a whirr of retractor motors, and the hold’s massive outer hatch began to open. Effectively, the hull-side wall of the bay slid to one side.
Light from the hold revealed what was behind it: another wall, blackened and scabbed, worn by age and scoured by the void, lumpy and corroded, fused and blistered. This was the outer skin of the Reach.
Alarm lights flashed on and off, warning that the atmospheric field surrounding the docking buffers was fighting to maintain a seal. There was no danger of explosive decompression into the hard vacuum outside, but Gaunt could feel the sharp breeze of the slow leaks: air rushing out around the inexact seal.
‘Can you stabilise it?’ he asked.
The artificers were already making adjustments to the shape and size of the atmospheric field via the control station. Further prayers of efficacy were offered to the machine spirits. Slowly, the lights stopped winking and the sucking air leaks died away.
Silence. Silence apart from the very distant creak and squeal of metal on metal.
Gaunt walked past the protective screens right up to the face of the Reach’s exposed outer skin. It was ugly, like blackened metal scar tissue, ridged and contorted beside the dank but clean hold structures of the Armaduke.
Gaunt took off his glove, put out his bare hand, and touched the alien metal. It was only just beginning to warm from the ambient heat of the hold’s atmosphere. Gaunt felt an eternity of void cold, the legacy of airless dark. He felt the chill contours of threats and promises.
He looked at the chief artificer.
‘Prepare to cut it,’ he ordered.
The vox-officer was standing by. Gaunt relayed the same order to Major Pasha, and then switched channels to speak to Shipmaster Spika.
‘Bridge.’
‘Shipmaster, please signal Strike Alpha to launch. The order is given.’
‘Understood.’
Launch Artificer Goodchild placed the vox-horn back on its hook, stood up and walked down the metal gangplank into his supervision gallery. The brass control board had been purified and blessed, and the votive seals, threads of inscribed paper attached by wax and red ribbons, had been removed from the lever controls and dials.
Goodchild had only to say one word. His servitors and technicians set to work. Greased pistons began to elevate sections of the deck. Exhaust vents clattered open. The main and secondary lighting systems of the principal excursion deck dimmed to cold blue and yellow hazard lamps began to flash. There was a pressure drop as the main airgates and outer space doors opened, hingeing out and away like the petals of a flower. The atmospheric envelope adjusted accordingly. Field strength peaked. Voices murmured all around him: the augmetic drone of servitors mindlessly pronouncing streams of technical calibration figures, and flight crew adepts monotonously repeating the catechisms of service and duty.
On the main deck below, gangs of ratings, many of them bulk-grown abhuman serfs, hauled away the cable lines and mooring wires, cranking them into the under deck drums. The first six boats on the primary landing were laden and waiting, lift systems running. Through-deck hoists were already lifting the next wave of craft up from the parking hangar. It was unusual for small craft like Arvus lighters and Falco atmospherics to be hoisted or repositioned with personnel on board, but the shipmaster had expressed to Goodchild the importance of rapid launch. Laden with lasmen and assault equipment, the landing craft were being loaded into the launch platform like ammunition into a gun.
The first craft lifted and began to accelerate towards the space doors. It was the heavyweight giant that Goodchild had seen aboard at Tavis Sun, a martial brute in the colours of the Silver Guard. Its pattern designation was Caestus, an assault ram vehicle of ancient Adeptus Astartes design, a machine built for boarding actions. Its rear burners lit hot yellow as it cleared the airgate and then turned wild green as it slipped through the hazy edge of the atmospheric field into hard space.
Behind it came the first of the assault carriers: Arvus-pattern craft, both long and standard body variants, followed by four Falco boats. They launched in pairs, their engines making shriller, thinner sounds compared to the guttural throb of the Caestus. The engine sounds died away as soon as the small ships left the atmospheric field.
The second launch wave was already sliding onto the ramp.
Goodchild walked back to his vox station and lifted the horn.
‘We have launch conditions,’ he reported. ‘Launching in progress.’
Vox mic held ready in his hand, Beltayn watched the shipmaster and the other senior bridge officers gathered around the glowing strategium console. On the hololith, little patches of lights were spitting out of the imaged Armaduke, and whipping away in formation around the seam of the Reach structure. Spika had brought the resolution up, so not all of the Reach was being projected. Beltayn saw the little clusters of fast lights, like neon seeds, zipping across the ragged topography of the Reach’s hull away from the Armaduke, flying very low, hugging the terrain to avoid detection. Beltayn noticed the way Spika was drumming his fingertips on the handrail of the strategium as
he watched. There was a slightly sour odour on the bridge, the smell of adrenaline. It wasn’t just the stressed crew: bio-wired into the neurosystems of the ship, the abhumans and serfs were reacting in tension too.
The ship itself was nervous.
‘Strike Alpha eight minutes to target,’ intoned one of the seniors.
Spika nodded. His fingertips drummed.
At the helm of the Caestus, Pilot-servitor Terek-8-10 maintained a steady course. His biomechanical hands rested on the helm controls, though he was operating the heavy machine through the neural impulse linkage of his augmetic plugs. Manual control was for emergencies. The chambers of his hearts thrilled to the output of the engines either side of him. Forward view through the small window port was restricted. He was following a tight course through the broken geography of the target area’s surface plotted by auspex and displayed via hololithic router. The Caestus was leading the assault flight, twisting around slopes of junk, banking over torn pylons, hugging the floors of metal ravines and chasms, even flying under accidentally created bridges and outcrops of shredded machinery.
Rear-projecting auspex showed the troop landers tight on his tail, following his lead. Terek-8-10 was also detecting steady vital readings from the three individuals strapped into the inertial suppression clamps in the armoured compartments of the twin hull booms below and ahead of him.
The vitals were impossibly slow, as though the individuals were so calm they were almost asleep.
Terek-8-10 woke up the weapon servitors and their fragile little sinus rhythms lit up alongside the three slow, heavy pulses.
‘Four minutes,’ the pilot-servitor intoned, each word clean and separate, each word significant.
In lateral sixteen, Gaunt watched the artificers roll the Hades breaching drill into position. Its vast cutting head was just a hair’s breadth from the face of the Reach’s exposed hull. The last few blessings were being made over its systems.
The chief artificer glanced at Gaunt.
Gaunt held up three fingers.
Three minutes remaining.
The Arvus was buffeting hard. Freak electromagnetics plagued the ravines and canyons scoring the metal skin of Salvation’s Reach. It wasn’t the most pleasant ride Gol Kolea had ever known.