Vermilion Level

by Dan Abnett

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  VERMILION LEVEL

  Dan Abnett

  'After the intense battle to retake the manufacturing hives of Caligula, High Commander Macaroth’s crusade force came about and chased the breaking chaos elements into the edges of Canopus and Nubila Reach. It was the start of the twelfth year of the Sabbat Worlds Campaign, the Imperial liberation of a hundred system cluster in the Segmentum Pacificus, and the first major advantage gained since Slaydo's massive victory at Balhaut.

  As the fast fleet components advanced, many regiments of the Imperial Guard, exhausted from the Caligula offensive, took precious shore leave on Pyrites before receiving new battle orders and moving to the next assembly point...'

  - from A History of The Later Imperial Crusades

  DAY TWO NINETY,

  NUBILA REACH, DEEP SPACE

  The two Faustus-class Interceptors swept in low over a thousand slowly spinning tonnes of jade asteroid and decelerated to coasting velocity. Striated blurs of shift-speed light flickered off their gunmetal hulls and the mauve haze of the Nubila Reach nebula hung as a backdrop for them, a thousand light years wide.

  Each of these patrol interceptors was an elegant barb about one hundred paces from jutting nose to raked tail. The Faustus were lean, powerful warships that looked like serrated cathedral spires with splayed flying buttresses at the rear to house the main thrusters. Their armoured flanks bore the Imperial Eagle, and the green markings and insignia of the Segmentum Pacificus Fleet.

  In the command seat of the lead ship, Wing Captain Torten LaHain forced down his heart rate as the ship decelerated. Synchronous mind-impulse links hooked his metabolism to the ship's ancient systems, and he lived and breathed every nuance of its motion, power output and response.

  LaHain was a twenty-year veteran, who'd piloted Faustus Interceptors for so long, they seemed an extension of his body.

  He glanced down into the flight annex directly below and behind the command seat, where his observation officer was at work at the navigation station.

  'Well?' he asked over the intercom.

  The observer checked off his calculations against several glowing runes on the board. 'Steer five points starboard. The astropath's instructions are to sweep down the edge of the gas clouds for a final look, and then it's back to the fleet.'

  Behind him, there was a murmur. The astropath, hunched in his small throne- cradle, stirred. Hundreds of leads linked the astropath's socket-encrusted skull to the massive sensory apparatus in the Faustus's belly. Each one was marked with a small, yellowing parchment label, inscribed with words LaHain didn't want to have to read. There was a smell of incense, and unguents.

  'What's up with him?' asked LaHain.

  The observer shrugged. 'Who knows? Who wants to?' he mused.

  The astropath's brain was constantly surveying and processing the vast wave of astronomical data that the ship's sensors pumped into it, and psychically probing warpspace beyond. Small patrol ships like this, with their astropathic cargo, were the early warning arm of the Fleet. The work was hard on the psyker's mind, and the odd moan or grimace was commonplace. There had been worse. They'd gone through a nickel-rich asteroid field the previous week, and the psyker had gone into spasms.

  'Flight check,' said LaHain into the intercom.

  'Tail turret, ready by the Emperor,' crackled back the servitor at the rear of the ship.

  'Flight engineer, ready, aye!' fuzzed the voice of the engine chamber.

  LaHain signalled his wingman. 'Moselle... you run forward and begin the sweep. We'll lag a way behind you as a double check. Then we'll pull for home.'

  'Mark that,' replied the pilot of the other ship, and it gunned forward, a sudden blur that left twinkling pearls in its wake.

  LaHain was about to kick in behind when the voice of the astropath came over the link. It was rare for the man to ever speak to the rest of the crew.

  'Captain... move to the following coordinates and hold. I am receiving a signal. A message... source unknown.'

  LaHain did as he was instructed and the ship banked around, motors flaring in quick, white bursts. The observer swung all the sensor arrays to bear.

  'What is this?' asked LaHain, impatient. Unscheduled manoeuvres off a carefully set patrol sweep did not sit comfortably with him.

  The astropath took a moment to respond, clearing his throat. 'It is an astropathic communique, struggling to get through the warp. It is at the very edge of its range. I must gather it and relay it to Fleet Command.'

  'Why?' asked LaHain. This was all too irregular.

  'I sense it is secret. It is primary level intelligence. It is Vermilion level.'

  There was a long pause, a silence aboard the small, slim craft broken only by the hum of the drive, the chatter of the displays and the whirr of the air-scrubbers.

  'Vermilion...' breathed LaHain. It was a near-mythical clearance level. Even main battle schemes usually only warranted a Magenta. He felt an icy tightness in his wrists, a tremor in his heart. Sympathetically, the interceptor's reactor fibrillated. LaHain swallowed. A routine day had just become very un-routine. He knew he had to commit everything to the correct and efficient recovery of this data.

  'How long do you need?' he asked over the link.

  Another pause. 'The ritual will take a few moments. Do not disturb me as I concentrate. I need as long as possible,' said the astropath. There was a phlegmy, strained edge to his voice. In a moment, that voice was murmuring a prayer. The air temperature in the cabin dropped perceptibly.

  LaHain flexed his grip on the rudder stick. He looked out of the canopy at the swathe of pinkish mist that folded away from him into the heart of the nebula a billion miles away. The cold, stabbing light of older suns slanted and shafted through it like dawnlight on gossamer. Dark-bellied clouds swirled in slow, silent blossoms.

  'Contacts!' yelled the observer suddenly. 'Three! No, four! Fast as hell and coming on strong!'

  LaHain snapped to attention. 'Angle and lead time?'

  The observer rattled out a set of coordinates and LaHain steered the nose towards them. 'They're coming in fast!' the observer repeated. 'Throne of Earth, but they're moving!'

  LaHain looked across his over-sweep board and saw the runic cursors flashing as they edged into the tactical grid.

  'Defence system activated! Weapons to ready!' he barked. Drum autoloaders chattered in the chin turret forward of him as they armed the autocannons, and power reservoirs whined as they powered up the main forward-firing plasma guns.

  'Wing Two to Wing One!' Moselle's voice rasped over the long range voxcaster. 'They're all over me! Break and run! Break and run in the name of the Emperor!'

  The other Interceptor was coming at him at close to full thrust. LaHain's enhanced optics, amplified and linked via the canopy's systems, saw Moselle's ship while it was still a thousand kilometres away. Behind it, lazy and slow, came the vampiric shape of predatory ships of Chaos. Fire patterns winked in the russet darkness. Yellow traceries of venomous death.

  Moselle's scream - abruptly ended - tore through the voxcast.

  The racing Interceptor disappeared in a rapidly expanding, superheated fireball.

  The three attackers thundered on through the firewash.

  'They're coming for us! Bringing her about!' yelled LaHain and threw the Faustus round, gunning the engines. 'How much longer?' he bellowed at the astropath.

  'The communique is received. I am now relaying...' gasped the astropath, at the edge of his limits.

  'Fast as you can! We have no time!' said LaHain.

  The sleek fighting ship bl
inked forward, thrust-drive roaring blue heat. LaHain rejoiced at the singing of the engine in his blood. He was pushing the threshold tolerances of the ship. Amber alert sigils were lighting his display. He was being crushed into his command chair.

  In the tail turret, the gunner servitor traversed the twin autocannons, hunting for a target. He didn't see the attackers, but he saw their absence: the flickering darkness against the stars.

  The turret guns screamed into life, blitzing out a scarlet-tinged, boiling stream of hypervelocity fire.

  Indicators screamed shrill warnings in the cockpit. The enemy had obtained multiple target lock.

  Down below, the observer was bawling up at LaHain, demanding evasion procedures. Over the link, the flight engineer was saying something about a stress-injection leak.

  LaHain was serene.

  'Is it done?' he asked the astropath calmly.

  There was another long pause. The astropath was lolling weakly in his cradle. Near to death, his brain ruined by the trauma of the act, the psyker murmured, 'It is finished...'

  LaHain turned the Interceptor in a savage loop and presented himself to the pursuers with the massive forward plasma array and the nose guns blasting. He couldn't outrun them or outfight them, but by the Emperor, he'd take at least one with him before he went.

  The chin turret spat a thousand heavy bolt rounds a second. The plasma-guns howled phosphorescent death into the void. One of the shadow-shapes exploded in a bright blister of flame, its shredded fuselage and mainframe splitting out and being carried along by the burning, incandescent bow- wave of igniting propellant.

  LaHain scored a second kill too. He ripped open the belly of another attacker, spilling its pressurised guts into the void. It burst like a ripe fruit, spinning round in the shuddering impact and spewing its contents like a firetrail after it.

  A second later a rain of toxic and corrosive warheads, each a sliver of metal like a dirty needle, raked the Faustus end to end. They detonated the astropath's head and explosively atomised the observer out through the punctured hull. Another killed the flight engineer outright and exploded the reactor interlock.

  Two billiseconds after that, stress fractures shattered the Faustus class Interceptor like a glass bottle. A super-dense explosion boiled out from the core, vaporising the ship and LaHain with it.

  The corona of the blast rippled out two kilometres until it vanished in the nebula's haze.

  DAY THREE TEN,

  PYRITES

  The Imperial Needle of Cracia was quite a piece of work, Colonel Colm Corbec of the Tanith Ghosts decided. It towered over Cracia, the largest and oldest city on Pyrites, a three thousand metre ironwork tower, raised four hundred years before, partly in honour of the Emperor but mostly in honour of the engineering skill of the Pyriteans. It was taller than the jagged turrets of the Arbites Precinct, and dwarfed even the great twin towers of the Ecclesiarch palace.

  On cloudless days, the city became a giant sundial, with the spire as the gnomon. City dwellers could tell precisely the time of day by which streets of the city were in shadow.

  Today was not a cloudless day. It was winter season in Cracia and the sky was a dull, unreflective white like an untuned vis-caster screen. Snow fluttered down out of the leaden sky and iced the gothic rooftops and towers of the old, grey city, edging the ornate decorations, the wrought guttering and brass eaves, the skeletal iron fire escapes and the sills of lancet windows.

  But it was warm down here on the streets. Under the stained glass, ironwork awnings that edged every thoroughfare, the walkways and concourses were heated. Kilometres below the city, ancient turbines pumped warm air up to the hypercaust beneath the pavements and circulated under the awning levels. A low-power energy sheath broadcast at first floor height stopped rain or snow from ever reaching the pedestrian levels.

  At a terrace cafe, Corbec, first sergeant of the Tanith First-and-Only, a big man with unruly black hair and a smile in his eyes, sipped his beer and rocked back on his black, ironwork chair. They liked black ironwork here on Pyrites. They made everything out of it. Even the beer, by the taste of it.

  A shadow apparently bigger than the Imperial Needle blotted out the daylight. Are we set?' asked Trooper Bragg.

  Corbec squinted up at the huge, placidfaced trooper, the biggest man in the regiment. 'It's still early. They say this town has quite a nightlife, but it won't get going until after dark.'

  'Seems dead. No fun,' said Bragg drearily.

  'Hey, lucky we got Pyrites rather than Guspedin. By all accounts that's just dust and slag and endless hives.'

  The lighting standards down each thoroughfare and under the awnings were beginning to glow into life as the automated cycle took over. But it was still daylight.

  'We've been talking-' Bragg began.

  'Who's "we"?' asked Corbec.

  'Uh, Larks and me... and Varl. And Suth.' Bragg shuffled a little. 'We heard about this little wagering joint. It might be fun.'

  'Fine.'

  'Cept it's, uh-'

  'What?' asked Corbec, knowing full well what the 'uh' would be.

  'It's in a cold zone,' said Bragg.

  Corbec got up and dropped a few coins of the local currency on the glass-topped table next to his empty beer. 'Trooper, you know the cold zones are off-limits,' he said smoothly. 'The regiments have been given four days' recreation in this city, but that recreation is contingent on several things: reasonable levels of behaviour, so as not to offend or disrupt the citizens of this most ancient and civilised burg; restrictions to the use of prescribed bars, clubs, wager-halls and brothels; and a total ban on Guard personnel leaving the heated areas of the city. The cold zones are lawless.'

  Bragg nodded. 'Yeah... but there are five hundred thousand Imperial Guardsmen on leave in Cracia, clogging up the starports and the tram depots. Each one has been to fething hell and back in the last few weeks. Do you honestly think they're going to behave themselves?'

  Corbec pursed his lips and sighed. 'No, Bragg. I do not. Tell me where this place you're talking about is. I've an errand or two to run. I'll meet you there later.'

  In the mirror-walled, smoky bar of the Polar Imperial, one of the better hotels in uptown Cracia, right by the Administratum complex, Commissar Vaynom Blenner was describing the destruction of the battleship Eradicus. It was a complex, colourful evocation, and involved the skilled use of a lit cigar, smoke rings, expressive gestures and throaty sound effects.

  Around the table, there were appreciative hoots and laughs.

  Ibram Gaunt watched and said nothing. Tall, powerful, lean with close-cropped hair, fierce eyes and a face as slender as his name, he was often silent. It disarmed people.

  Blenner had always been a showman, even back in their days at the Commissariat. Gaunt always looked forward to their reunions: Blenner was about as close as he came to having an old friend, and it strangely reassured him to see Blenner's face, constant through the years when so many faces perished and disappeared.

  But Blenner was also a terrible boast, and he'd become weak and complacent, enjoying a little too much of the good life. For the last decade, he'd served with the Greygorian Third. The Greys were efficient, hard working, and few regiments were as unswervingly loyal to the Emperor, it was said. They'd spoiled Blenner.

  Blenner hailed the waiter and ordered another tray of drinks for the officers at his table. Gaunt's eyes wandered across the crowded salon, where the officer classes of the Imperial Guard relaxed and mixed.

  On the far side of the room, under a vast, gilt-framed oil painting of Imperial Titans striding to war, he caught sight of officers in the grey and gold uniform of the Royal Volpone 50th, the so-called Bluebloods.

  One of them was a big, arrogant aristocrat that Gaunt knew all too well - Major Gizhaum Danver de Banzi Haight Gilbear, the Bluebloods' second in command.

  Their gaze met for a few seconds. The exchange was as warm and friendly as a pair of automated range finders getting a mutual target lock.


  'Commissar Gaunt?'

  Gaunt looked up. A uniformed hotel porter stood by his armchair, his head tilted to a position that was both obsequious and superior. Snooty ass, thought Gaunt. Loves the Guard all the while we're saving the universe for him, but let us in his precious hotel bar to relax and he's afraid we'll scuff the furniture.

  'There is a boy, sir,' said the porter disdainfully. 'A boy in reception who wishes to see you.'

  'Boy?' asked Gaunt.

  'He said to give you this,' continued the porter. He held out a silver Tanith ear hoop suspectly between velveted finger and thumb.

  Gaunt got to his feet and followed him out.

  Across the room, Gilbear watched him go. He beckoned over his aide with a surly finger. 'Go and find Sergeant Tomas and some of his clique. I think there will be games tonight.'

  Gaunt followed the strutting porter out into the marble foyer. His distaste for the place grew with each second. Pyrites was soft, pampered, so far away from the harsh warfronts. They pay their tithes to the Emperor and in return ignore completely the darker truths of life beyond their civilised domain. Even the Imperial troops stationed here as a permanent garrison seemed to have gone soft.

  Gaunt broke from his reverie and saw Brin Milo hunched under a potted ourorobos tree. The boy was wearing his Ghost uniform and looked most unhappy.

  'Milo? I thought you were going with the others. Corbec said he'd take you with the Tanith. What are you doing in a stuffy place like this?'

  Milo fetched a small data-slate out of his thigh pocket and presented it. 'This came through the voxcaster after you'd gone, sir. Executive Officer Kreff thought it best it was brought straight to you. And, as I'm supposed to be your adjutant, they gave the job to me.'

  Gaunt almost grinned at the boy's weary tone. He took the slate and keyed it open. 'What is it?' he asked.

  'All I know, sir, is it's a personal communique delivered on an encrypted channel for your attention forty-' he paused and consulted his timepiece. 'Forty-seven and a half minutes ago.'