Salvation's Reach

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  WARHAMMER 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  Came then he, a prisoner, into the

  House of the Daemon, and he was bound about

  and anointed so that his life could be

  taken in offering, as was the custom.

  But he slipped his bonds, and made a fire

  burn inside the House of the Daemon,

  and burned it he from the inside out,

  and so the Daemon it was that

  burned and was slain.

  – from the Kinebrach myth of the Rath and the Hero

  ‘Throughout the year 781.M41, Warmaster Macaroth’s main battle groups remained deadlocked at the frontiers of the Erinyes Group, despite his strenuous efforts to force a breakthrough. Macaroth’s primary crusading strength was held off by a formidable defensive line composed of the forces of Archon Gaur, the Archenemy overlord.

  ‘Meanwhile, trailwards, the Warmaster’s second battle group had repeatedly failed to dislodge the legions of Magister Anakwanar Sek, Gaur’s most capable lieutenant, from the Cabal Systems. Senior advisors urged Macaroth to break off from his bull-headed prosecution of the Erinyes Line, and concentrate on quashing Sek at the Cabal Worlds. With the threat of Sek removed, they counselled, the Crusade could safely resume an assault of the Archon’s position. But Macaroth rejected the notion, claiming it would give the Archon enough time – perhaps two or three years – to rebuild and retrench to such an extent that the Erinyes Line would become unassailable.

  ‘Split between these two concentrations of resistance, Macaroth’s Crusade was haemorrhaging momentum and materiel. The Crusade had become two crusades, and even Macaroth’s vast war-tithes, and massive support from the sector lords, could not sustain his ambitions. Furthermore, there was a general and growing fear that, if properly co-ordinated, the forces of Sek and Gaur might combine with such effect, the Sabbat Worlds Crusade force would actually be annihilated.

  ‘During this critical period, a series of covert operations was planned and executed at key sites across the Sabbat Worlds. The most critical, and the one upon which all the others depended, was undertaken at Salvation’s Reach in the remote Rimworld Marginals. Seen as a huge gamble, and with atrocious prospects for success, the mission was authorised by Macaroth on the basis that, if accomplished by some miracle, it could alter the balance of the war entirely.

  ‘This was the twenty-sixth year of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, and Macaroth was increasingly looking like a man prepared to try anything, and risk everything, to secure a victory.’

  – from A History of the Later Imperial Crusades

  ONE

  Suicide Kings

  Something, perhaps the year of living by the skin of his teeth on occupied Gereon, or merely the fact of having been born a sly and ruthless son of a bitch, had given Major Rawne of the Tanith First a certain edge.

  He could usually smell trouble coming. That morning, he could definitely smell trouble coming. As edges went, his was as fine and sharp as the one along the blade of his straight silver warknife.

  At dawn, with the twin suns beginning to burn up through the petrochemical smog across the city bay, he left the regimental billet and walked down to the rockcrete wasteland of the bayside revetment. There, he wandered as far as the bridge, and crossed over to the pontoons in front of the island guardhouse.

  The pontoon walkway clunked underfoot. Looking down through the mesh, he could see the water, toxic brown and frothy. The massive galvanic plants along the bay, Adeptus Mechanicus developments that powered and lit the hive city’s core systems, had just flushed their heatsinks, and filled the coastline with its morning dose of radioactive effluent. There was steam in the air, steam that stank of sulphur and rolled like a fog bank, white in the suns’ light. The waters of the bay and estuary had been corrosively acidic for a thousand years. It was sobering to think that anything still lived in it.

  But things did. Just below the surface, they squirmed and moved, leech-mouthed, slug-slick, with dentition like crowded pincushions and eyes like phlegm. Rawne could see them, following him beneath the surface; a dark, wriggling mass. What gave them their edge? Was it the sound of his footsteps, the passing heat signature of his body? Pheromones? His shadow on the water?

  They were survivors. They had adapted to their environment instead of allowing it to kill them. And they killed anything that threatened them.

  Just like him.

  Three Urdeshi troopers were manning the guardhouse. They didn’t know him, and he didn’t know them. They weren’t his concern. He had chosen that particular morning because it was pretty much the last chance he was going to get before the regiment shipped out. The point of no turning back had been reached.

  But still, there was the nagging discomfort of his edge. Something was off. Something was wrong. He’d chosen the wrong day to try it. Maybe the troopers suspected him of something, maybe they were wired up for some reason. Maybe something had given away his true intent.

  Under ordinary circumstances, the doubt would have been enough to make him abort, turn around, and go home. The uncertainty would have been sufficient to make him blow it off and try again another day when the odds were more favourable.

  Except there weren’t going to be any more other days. It was now, or it was never. There were no more chances. The monster, that monster, should have been dead long since. Justice and decency demanded it, and only the dedicated efforts of good men who ought to have known better we
re ensuring the monster’s salvation.

  Dedication. Rawne had always possessed a measure of dedication. He knew what was right and what was wrong. He knew when an order was a bad thing and needed to be ignored. He knew that sometimes a man had to be counter-intuitive. A man had to do what looked like a bad thing so that everything else would be right in the end.

  The monster was destined to die. Its death was required, demanded. Efforts had already been made, by more than one interested party. Rawne couldn’t stand by and let things carry on.

  Rawne was a man of serious convictions, after all. Thankfully, they’d all been wiped from his record the day he joined the Imperial Guard.

  The Urdeshi watched him as he approached. What did they suspect? Did they know what he had really come for?

  He stopped at the outer cage gate. The Urdeshi troopers wore black metal pins that indicated they had been seconded to serve the Commissariat’s S Company, the close protection and security detail. They asked him his name and his business, and studied the papers he passed through the metal letterbox. One of them took a long time over the Contact Permission document signed by Rawne’s commanding officer, as though he had literacy problems.

  They let him through. They checked his ID tags. They eyed his tattoos with scorn. He was some kind of heathen farm-head from an agri-world, an indentured barbarian, not a proper fighting man from a civilised place like Urdesh. Only his rank kept the insults at bay.

  They took his sidearm, put it in the guardhouse locker, and made him sign for it. Then they patted him down.

  The Urdeshi had been fairly thorough up until that point, but now the long night shift and a clutch of caffeine headaches began to show. Rawne had been patted down by the very best in his time. He knew precisely how to twist or turn, innocent movements that looked like balance-keeping, so that even somebody taking the pat-down seriously could be misled and misdirected. Rawne kept his hands raised. By the time they’d finished, they would believe they had methodically checked everywhere, where in fact he had kept them entirely clear of one or two areas.

  They found the knife. Tanith warknife, straight silver, buckled to his right shin.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked one.

  ‘Back-up,’ replied Rawne.

  They took it, made him sign for it.

  He’d wanted them to find it. It was the decoy. People believed they’d done a thorough job if they found something. People usually stopped searching at that point.

  ‘You’ve got thirty minutes,’ said one of the guards. ‘That is the permitted duration authorised by your papers. You will be back here in twenty-nine minutes. If you’re not, we will come looking for you and you will be considered a justified target.’

  Rawne nodded.

  They opened the inner cage gate. Its chain hoist clattered. He walked through the guardhouse and out onto the inner causeway of the pontoons. The tide clearly caught here between the vast stone piers of the island. There was a pronounced stink of sulphur, and a soupy mass of dissolving garbage lapped against the slimy walls of the inlet.

  He left the pontoon walkway and climbed stone steps that brought him in under the archway entrance. The island was an artificial atoll of stone and rockcrete built to support a squat, formidable lighthouse tower. The bridge that had originally connected it to the shore had long since rotted away. It had been replaced by the metal pontoon and the walk span.

  The lighthouse hadn’t burned for a long time. Dark and neglected, the tower’s thick walls and inaccessibility had been put to other uses.

  Once he was out of sight of the guardhouse, Rawne stepped back into the shadows. He reached down to his left calf, and removed the other Tanith warknife he was carrying. He had tied it around his shin with boot laces. The one he’d surrendered had been Meryn’s. Rawne had taken it without asking. Meryn would probably be searching his billet for it already. It added to Rawne’s enjoyment of the whole enterprise to think that, whatever else happened, Meryn would end up on a charge for misplacing his regimental dagger.

  Rawne believed the knife would probably be enough. It certainly ought to be enough for any self-respecting Tanith-born to get the job done. But he wanted to cover all the variables.

  Off to the side of the lowering entrance archway was a dim stone cistern. It had once been the chute of a garderobe, or a drain-away built to cope with heavy storm swells. The edge of his warknife, deftly applied, freed the lip of the cast iron cover. Rawne hooked his fingers around the bars of the cover and lifted it out. There was a damp stone well underneath, with water lurking in the darkness at the bottom. Other things lurked down there too, things with pincushion gums and egg-white eyes. He could hear them slopping and writhing gleefully, as if entertained by his cunning.

  The cord had been attached to the underside of the drain cover, so that it hung down into the shaft of the well, weighted by the waxed burlap musette bag on the end. He pulled the line up, and the bag with it, opened the drawstring top, and took out the heavy object wrapped in vizzy cloth.

  It was a collection of objects in fact, all of them dense and heavy. Machined metal components. Rawne spread the cloth on the stone floor beside the drain, and laid the parts out on it. He slotted them together, quickly and skilfully. He’d done it a thousand times before. He could have done it blindfold. Each piece clacked or wound into place. The smell of gun oil was sweet and strong in his nostrils.

  Standard Munitorum-issue laspistol, Khulan V pattern. It was one of the original stamped blanks shipped from Khulan for finishing in the armouries of Tanith, prior to issue at the Tanith Founding. The palm-spur had been fitted with a handmade nalwood grip, and age and use had lent the figuring greater beauty than any varnish or lacquer could have achieved.

  The pistol had been smuggled into the lighthouse over a period of weeks, one part at a time. It lacked a power cell, a flash sleeve and the side casings. Rawne reached into his belt pouch. Inside were two cigars rolled in black liquorice paper. The S Company sentries had taken them out, sniffed them, and given them back. Each cigar was in a little tin case. Except they weren’t. One of the tin cases was actually a flash sleeve. Rawne blew out the traces of tobacco fibre and screwed the sleeve onto the end of the barrel.

  The Urdeshi had also failed to notice that he was wearing four tags, not two. Rawne unlooped the two side plates from the slender chain, dropped the tags back down under the neckline of his vest, and slotted the side plates into position.

  Then he struck the tip of his knife into the back of his boot heel, and pulled the heel block away from the upper. The power cell was secured in a cavity he’d hollowed out of the heel. Rawne stamped the heel back in place, then slapped the cell into the gun. He toggled off, armed it, got a tiny green light on the grip just above his thumb. He felt the ambient hum of a charged las weapon.

  He dropped the drain cover back, slipped the knife into his belt, and walked up the steps from the entrance archway with the pistol down at his side in his right hand.

  There was a semicircular stone chamber beyond, large and full of echoes. Munitorum-issue armoured window units had been bolted or heat-fused into the gaping stone sockets. Rawne passed on into a larger stone chamber, fully circular and three or four storeys high. It was the core of the lighthouse. In the base, dead centre, stood some of the old lampwork, a great, engineered brass contraption with a wick-mount, winding handles, and a reservoir feed from the promethium sump below. A huge frame of gearing and chainlines surrounded it to elevate the lamp to the beacon room at the apex of the tower once it was lit.

  The brass lampwork was black with age and the chains had rusted. The gears and winders were so corroded they had frozen, blotched green and white, and would never turn again. Decades of dust had accreted on the black grease of the lamp head and wick assembly in such quantity it looked like some exotic, thickly furred animal mounted on display.

  Rawne walked up the stairs that ran around the curve of the chamber wall. There was no rail, and he made no sound, though the lat
ter was not even deliberate. Like many Tanith, he had been taught by that great educator, life, not to give himself away.

  He smelled caffeine and the unmistakable aroma of fried nutrition fibre. Slab, staple of the common lasman’s diet, cornerstone of Guard rations.

  Rawne reached a landing space. There was a doorway ahead. A guard, another Urdeshi man, was sitting beside the doorway on a chair borrowed from another building. Rawne kept the laspistol against his hip so that the man wouldn’t see it immediately. He kept walking. It was all about confidence. Confidence was the key to everything. Use enough of it and you could pull off any scam, win any fight, or bed any mamzel. The more you acted like you were absolutely supposed to be doing something, the less chance anyone would ask what the hell you were up to, until it was too late, and they were – depending on the circumstances – financially worse off, dead, or surprisingly naked.

  The guard didn’t spare him a second look. Rawne passed him, and went in through the doorway.

  The room had originally been the tower master’s chamber. It was bare boards and grilled windows, and the corkscrew staircase ran up the inside wall to the platform levels higher in the tower. The room currently contained a heavy wooden cot, a small trolley table and an old wooden chair.

  The cot was neatly made, the blanket and bedroll laid out as if for a barrack hall inspection. On the table was a small lumen lamp, some books and a cookhouse tray. On the tray was a tin cup and a flask of caffeine, a salt shaker, a mess dish with the remains of a serving of slab cake, hard biscuits and refried bean paste, and a worn metal spoon. Rawne was surprised they’d allowed a spoon. A determined man could turn a spoon into a weapon. He could sharpen it against stone, stab with it. If he didn’t have time to work its edge, he could improvise. Even blunt, it could do damage to an eye or a throat if driven with enough force.