Salvation's Reach Read online

  ‘Where’s Dorden? I deal with Dorden.’

  Kolding stared back at him. His eyes were unreadable behind those damn tinted lenses. He was worse than that damn native partisan Ibram insisted on keeping around.

  ‘Dor-den,’ said Blenner, elaborately separating the syllables as though Kolding was a simpleton.

  ‘You’ll have to come back,’ said Kolding.

  ‘Throne I will! I want to see Dorden now!’

  ‘Kolding, what’s taking so–’

  Curth emerged from the back with an urgent demeanour. She stopped short as soon as she saw Blenner.

  ‘Commissar.’

  ‘I want to see Dorden,’ Blenner said.

  Curth looked quickly at Kolding. She took something out of a cabinet drawer and handed it to him.

  ‘Go on,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be right there.’ Kolding disappeared back into the rear of the infirmary.

  ‘That man needs training in interpersonal skills,’ said Blenner.

  ‘How can I help you?’ asked Curth.

  ‘And you need training in basic comprehension,’ said Blenner. ‘I want to see Dorden.’

  He realised instantly that she wasn’t in the mood for playful scolding. Her mood was hard and prickly, even by Ana Curth standards.

  ‘There’s an emergency,’ she said. ‘He can’t attend you just now. How can I help you?’

  Blenner pursed his lips. He wanted Dorden, but he quite liked the excuse to have to deal with her. His business with Dorden could probably wait.

  He took the little bag Wilder had given him out of his coat pocket and tossed it to Curth. She caught it neatly, one-handed.

  ‘What are these?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s what I want you to tell me.’

  She opened the bag, tipped a couple of the tablets out into her palm and squinted at them.

  ‘It’s a narcotic. Somnia. It’s a morphiac derivative. That’s a Munitorum pharmaceutical stamp. Where did you get them?’

  ‘They… turned up during a routine search. Are they strong?’

  ‘Pretty strong. I mean, I’d think twice about prescribing them. Effective, but addictive. I sometimes use the liquid version as palliative relief on very damaged patients.’

  ‘So, to ease their last hours?’

  ‘Yes. I’d have to have very compelling reasons to issue them otherwise. Perhaps to a patient in chronic pain who is allergic to safer compounds. You found one of the men with these?’

  ‘Yes. You missing them?’

  ‘I’d have to check, but I don’t think so. We carry such small quantities of this as standard, Lesp or one of the other orderlies would have noticed.’

  ‘There is an ongoing problem though, isn’t there?’ asked Blenner.

  ‘Yes, and we’re working on it. But it’s usually milder sedatives that are easier to misplace. Harder stuff like this is rarer. It could have come out of the ship’s supplies. Do you want me to ask the ship’s chief medicae?’

  ‘No,’ he said. He paused, and then repeated the word. ‘No, I just wanted them identified. Thank you.’

  ‘Well, if that’s all,’ she said. She clearly had somewhere else she wanted to be.

  ‘I’ll take them with me,’ he said, holding out his hand.

  ‘I should dispose of them,’ she replied. ‘Oversight of pharmaceuticals is a medicae responsibility.’

  ‘It’s still a discipline matter for now,’ he said. ‘I’ll need them back as evidence.’

  She resealed the bag and tossed it across to him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. He thought about the almost empty bottle in his pocket, but couldn’t bring himself to front her up with the question. He didn’t want her knowing. He needed to speak to Dorden.

  Blenner nodded politely and walked out of the infirmary. Curth issued a deep exhalation of tension and hurried away into the back rooms.

  In the hallway outside, Blenner collided with the orderly, Lesp, who was rushing towards the infirmary, leading Ayatani Zweil by the arm.

  ‘Watch where you’re going!’ Blenner exclaimed. He shot a look at Zweil, expecting some cantankerous barb back. Blenner had been around the regiment long enough to know that the old priest’s mouth didn’t possess a safety catch.

  The look on Zweil’s face took him by surprise. Care, anxiety, dread.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Blenner asked. His mind put the pieces together. An empty infirmary. Kolding and Curth trying to get him to leave. The orderly bringing the priest in a hurry.

  ‘Oh, Throne,’ said Blenner, and turned back, striding through the infirmary into the back room.

  ‘Wait. Please!’ Lesp called after him.

  ‘Vaynom, what’s-your-name, Blenner. Show some Throne-damned respect and don’t be an arsehole!’ Zweil yelled. They were both rushing after him.

  Blenner burst into the back office. Curth looked up from a tray of instruments in surprise, and the surprise quickly turned to despair at the sight of him. Kolding was on the far side of the room, administering a shot of something.

  Dorden had brought a trolley table over when he fell. Gleaming instruments lay scattered across the deck mesh. They’d made him comfortable with bolsters from the day bed, but they hadn’t dared lift him. He looked so thin and pale.

  ‘This isn’t the time,’ said Curth.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Blenner asked.

  ‘Could you give the medicae some dignity and leave, please?’ she said, coming over to Blenner. Lesp led Zweil past them to the old doctor’s side.

  ‘Yes, there’s no need for you to be here,’ said Zweil as he went by.

  ‘Is he dying?’ Blenner asked. Dorden was now partially obscured by the figures crouching around him. He hadn’t even seemed conscious when Blenner walked in.

  ‘You know he is,’ Curth replied quietly. He could see she was battling to retain her professional composure.

  ‘I mean now,’ said Blenner.

  ‘He’s been well for the last week,’ she said, her voice still low. ‘Amazingly so. But I think the stress of making shift has taken its toll. He collapsed just now. I think we can stabilise him and get him some bed rest.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have come on this mission,’ said Blenner.

  ‘It would have been crueller to leave him behind,’ Curth replied.

  ‘Should Gaunt know? I should get Gaunt.’

  ‘No!’ she replied, fiercely. ‘He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want a fuss. Let him rest!’

  ‘You’ve brought the damn priest to him,’ said Blenner. ‘If he’s come to administer the Imperial Grace, then Ibram deserves to–’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Zweil’s his friend. He’s been supporting him through this. It seemed right to fetch him here. Gaunt doesn’t need this on his mind just now.’

  Blenner swallowed.

  ‘I didn’t mean to just burst in,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘You could have said something. I do have a few circumspect bones in my body.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ she said.

  ‘I really should say something to Ibram,’ said Blenner. ‘If something happens, and he finds out I knew–’

  ‘Then you don’t know,’ said Curth. ‘You didn’t see anything.’

  Blenner thought about this, and nodded. He turned to go.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  A tiny flash of surprise crossed her face, as if it never occurred to anybody to ask her that.

  ‘Yes, commissar. Now get along so we can work.’

  Blenner left. Curth went to Dorden’s side.

  ‘I think he’s stabilised,’ said Kolding quietly.

  ‘You should take things more easily,’ said Curth.

  ‘Why?’ whispered Dorden. His voice was the vaguest whisper of dry leaves.

  ‘Because doctors make the worst patients,’ said Curth.

  ‘Actually, carnodons make the worst patients,’ said Zweil. ‘I knew a tamer, a circus man, worked the ba
g o’ nails on Hagia, and he owned this performing–’

  He paused. He saw the looks he was getting.

  ‘However, for now, I will stipulate that doctors, in fact, make worse patients that carnodons.’

  Dorden managed a tiny smile.

  ‘Even carnodons, let’s say, with infected gums that haven’t eaten for a week, and then you accidentally leave the cage door open…’ Zweil trailed off into a mumble.

  ‘Did I hear Blenner’s voice?’ Dorden asked.

  ‘He’s gone now.’

  ‘I don’t want a fuss,’ said Dorden.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Curth repeated. ‘He won’t say anything.’

  ‘Nothing to say,’ said Dorden. ‘I’ll be on my feet again in a moment. I’m just tired.’

  Curth looked up and saw Lesp trying not to cry.

  ‘He probably wants his pills,’ said Dorden. His voice was so far away. He beckoned Curth closer with twig fingers. ‘He comes to me for a little tonic. To settle him. Make sure you look after him, Ana.’

  ‘I will,’ she promised. ‘But let’s look after you first.’

  Close to the warp engines, the noise was immense. Everything, every surface, every wall panel, every tooth in a person’s head, vibrated at an ultrafast frequency.

  Layers of armour plate and bulkheads secured the drive chambers. Some sections were sealed chambers where only conditioned servitors or crewmen in protective armour could venture during drive function. Hard, hot yellow light shafted out through the letterbox viewing slits of the reinforced hatches like the glow from a furnace room port.

  Vast engineering spaces were filled with dripping, frosty coolant systems, or the black-greased pistons of circulation pumps and galvanic generators. In sooty caverns full of smoke and flame, ogryn and servitor stokers shovelled granulated promethium resin into the chutes of the combustion generators, the huge conventional turbines that ran the Armaduke’s non-drive systems. In other, cooler chambers, ancient and perfectly machined empyroscopic rotors spun along horizontal axes, maintaining the ship’s spatial equilibrium and helping to sustain the integrity of the Geller Field that protected the ship from the psycho-reactive fabric of the immaterium.

  The creature with Pol Cohran’s face concealed the body of the engineering ensign he had just murdered in a tool locker, and entered the massive engineering chamber containing the Armaduke’s Geller field device. He’d had to kill three times to get this close. The ship’s drive sections were not specifically secure or patrolled, but access or activity by anyone who wasn’t officer class or engineering division was immediately noticed. The first crewman had died because he’d seen Cohran. His body was now incinerating in a promethium furnace and Cohran was wearing his grimy overalls. The second and third crewmen had died because Cohran had needed to extract deck plan specifics and information about the drive deck layout. One was now crumpled at the bottom of a coolant drain, and the other had just been hung by the throat from a hook between stoking shovels and furnace tongs.

  Sound and vibration in the Geller field device chamber was oddly disconcerting. The air was dry, and there was a considerable static field that made his skin prickle. There were rubberised handrails around the chamber so that crewmen could earth themselves and not cause a shock or spark fire off the metal surfaces.

  He could feel the throb of the machine in his gut, the pulsing of its operation in his sinuses and eyeballs. The device, a piece of technology vital to all warpship function, generated a subatomic field around the ship, a bubble of realspace that protected the vessel from the vicissitudes of the aether around it. Once the warp engines had breached the veil of the warp, a starship depended on its Geller field to insulate it from the lethal and corrupting touch of the immaterium by maintaining a psychic ward.

  Cohran knew he was in a position to end it all. Sabotaging the Geller field device would take some doing, and would probably require the use of something explosive or combustible, but he was more than capable of procuring and using either. If he could collapse the Geller field while the Armaduke was still in the warp, then the ship would perish. It would be torn apart by the unreality storms of the raw aether, shredding in an instant. Either that, or the daemonic essence of the warp would find form and intrude into the ship, or the minds of the occupants. Unwarded, the ship would be vulnerable to the spawn of the Realm of Chaos, and everyone aboard would know only the extremity of madness before the Ruinous Powers devoured them.

  Then everything would be gone and done, and finished, the pheguth and his treachery, the threat that treachery represented, this whole vainglorious undertaking. The creature wearing Pol Cohran’s face would have completed the mission he was charged to perform by his master, Rime, and his master’s master, the Anarch. He would have finally stopped the Imperial Guard’s determined efforts to deploy the pheguth Mabbon Etogaur against the armies of the Gaur.

  But during his address, Gaunt had betrayed other secrets. The target was Salvation’s Reach. That intelligence needed to be communicated. More importantly, they were due to make conjunction at Tavis Sun. They would be rendezvousing with Battlefleet elements, possibly one of the considerable crusade fleet packs that were maintaining Imperial superiority in this part of the sector.

  To destroy the pheguth and his handlers, and the Armaduke along with it, that was a victory. To achieve all that and cripple a Battlefleet division, that was a truly worthy opportunity.

  A more subtle form of sabotage was needed. A more insidious piece of manipulation. His master had taught him well, trained him to improvise imaginatively in just such circumstances, to make the best use of elements at his disposal for the greatest effect.

  Cohran opened the casing of the control circuits that governed the empyroscopic rotors.

  He was not going to collapse the Geller field. He was simply going to alter its rhythm.

  Something, somewhere, trembled.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Shipmaster Spika.

  None of the bridge crew answered him directly. Copious quantities of data shunted through their connective links and displayed across the monitor plates. The air was filled with the dry scratchy voices of vox links talking to each other.

  He’d felt a minuscule vibration, an almost subliminal palsy. It had come to him through the deck, through the data-stream of the ship, one tiny aberrant shudder in a constant vortex of noises and rhythms and pulses and information.

  He consulted his data viewers and asked questions of his cogitators. Nothing seemed wrong, nothing out of place, not within the margins of operation, and certainly not given the temperamental and mercurial nature of an old warpship like the Highness Ser Armaduke.

  Spika sat back and thought. It had probably been nothing, or a fleeting glitch that had corrected itself.

  But it was a nothing he hadn’t liked at all.

  Cavity 29617 was cold. Merrt had been waiting there for about half an hour, unwilling to practise or set up shots, unwilling to leave.

  He sat at one end of the long chamber, arms hugged around the old rifle.

  ‘You are here. Good.’

  Sar Af was standing behind him. Merrt got up quickly.

  ‘You gn… gn…. gn… told me to come back,’ he said.

  ‘And you have proven you can follow instruction,’ said the White Scar.

  He reached out a hand and grabbed Merrt by the jaw and throat, turning Merrt’s head to the side. Merrt struggled again.

  ‘Let me gn… gn… gn… go!’

  ‘This jaw. It is definitely your problem,’ said Sar Af. ‘You are being defeated by your own concentration. Your focus is so intense that as you fire the gun, it stimulates–’

  ‘Yes. Yes! You told me all this gn… gn… gn… yesterday!’

  Sar Af let him go.

  ‘It is physically impossible for you to shoot well.’

  Merrt swallowed.

  ‘Again, you told me so yesterday. Did you ask me back just so you could gn… gn… gn… humiliate me?’

  Sar A
f stuck out his chin, as if considering a response. He turned away.

  ‘Set up a shot,’ he said.

  Merrt stood for a moment, then picked up several tin pots and walked the length of the cavity. He set the pots out along the top of the block and walked back to where the Space Marine was waiting.

  Sar Af had produced something from an equipment pouch. Merrt realised that it was a disposable shot injector just a second before the White Scar grabbed his head again and jammed it into his jawline, behind his left ear.

  The pain was considerable. Merrt cried out and staggered backwards, his eyes watering.

  ‘What the feth are you gn… gn… gn… doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Just wait.’

  Sar Af took the injector and tossed it away.

  Merrt had a lancing pain in his ear and a horrible warmth spreading through the line of his throat and his jaw. He started to gag slightly as the numbness increased.

  ‘Attend to yourself,’ said Sar Af. ‘You are drooling.’

  ‘What have you gn… gn… gn… done to me? What gn… gn… gn… was that stuff?’

  ‘Muscle relaxant,’ said the White Scar innocently. ‘Quite powerful, I suppose. A tranquiliser. The sort of stuff a medicae would use for pain control. During an amputation, for instance.’

  Clutching his throbbing, disturbed face, Merrt looked at the Space Marine in horror.

  ‘Pah, relax,’ said Sar Af. ‘I am not going to cut anything off. Not literally.’

  Merrt tried to answer, but he only managed to make a deep and inhuman rumbling in his throat. His entire jaw and cheek was numbed and immobile. The lower half of his face was inert and paralysed.

  ‘The jaw,’ said Sar Af, gesturing towards Merrt. ‘That jaw of yours. It is the root of your inability.’

  The Space Marine went over and picked up the old rifle. ‘You are being defeated by your own concentration,’ he said as he came back, as though he were repeating some litany lesson that needed to be repeated so that an unwilling student might eventually learn it.

  ‘Your focus is so intense that as you fire the gun, you twitch. So we need to remove the jaw from the equation. It cannot twitch if it cannot twitch.’

  Merrt felt ill. The paralysis was so unpleasant that he felt he might be sick, except he couldn’t guarantee that his mouth would open to allow it. Visions of choking on his own vomit filled his head and made things worse.