Salvation's Reach Read online

  Maybe it’s me, Rawne thought. Maybe I just see weapons in everything. Maybe to other people, that’s just a spoon.

  The books were all Imperial tracts and trancemissionary pamphlets, stamp-printed on brown, low-quality paper. It was all the monster ever seemed to read. He said they helped to settle him and fortify his resolve.

  The monster was sitting in the chair beside the table, reading one of the tracts while he digested his breakfast. He was wearing unmarked black fatigues, boots and a brown hide jacket. His shaved scalp and face were covered in deliberate ritual scars, old and puckered, but the hands holding the trancemissionary treatise were soft and unmarked.

  The monster became aware of Rawne’s approach. He stopped reading and looked up.

  ‘Major Rawne,’ he said. ‘I did not expect to see you this morning.’

  So damn polite. Like a real person.

  ‘Pheguth,’ Rawne replied.

  The monster looked startled for a second. It wasn’t just the fact that he had been called traitor in his own, abhuman tongue. It was the fluency of it. Rawne’s time on occupied Gereon had allowed him to acquire a conversational grasp of the Archenemy language. He didn’t merely know the word for betrayer, he could deliver it with colloquial authenticity. It was as though a part of the monster’s old life had come back to threaten him.

  The monster saw the weapon. He saw Rawne raising the laspistol from the guarded place beside his hip.

  ‘Major–’ he began.

  Rawne said nothing else. He took aim and fired.

  The crack of the discharge echoed around the room. Rawne heard seabirds roosting in the upper parts of the lighthouse launch into the air at the sound of the shot. Nothing else.

  Footsteps. There would be footsteps. Which side would they come from? What angle did he need to cover?

  Rawne looked at the monster. The monster, Mabbon Etogaur, looked back at him.

  ‘Come on, or you’re a dead man,’ Rawne said.

  Mabbon got up out of his chair. Rawne’s shot had severed the heavy iron chain that linked the etogaur’s manacles to a hefty floor pin. He looped up the trailing, cut end of the chain around his right hand.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Mabbon said.

  ‘No time to explain,’ Rawne replied.

  It was going to be from the right.

  The sea window blew in, exploding in a spray of armoured glass fragments. There was a man outside, on the lighthouse’s external walkway.

  Rawne tackled Mabbon and brought him down behind the trolley table and the cot. Three more las-shots shrieked in through the blown window space and scorched holes in the opposite wall. Prone, Mabbon looked at Rawne.

  Rawne gestured for him to keep down.

  The shooter outside switched his lasrifle to full auto and unleashed a storm of rounds into the room. Several struck the side of the heavy cot, splintering the wood and slamming the frame backwards. Some hit the trolley table and knocked it over. Some punctured the back of the old chair and filled the air with dust and floating animal hair fibres.

  Silence. Dust and smoke drifted in the sunlight. Mabbon looked set to move. Rawne, still flat on his belly, reached out and picked up the salt shaker that had been knocked off the tray. He used it like a pen, and drew on the stone floor in salt. The looping white lines formed the scratch symbol for ‘play dead’. The Blood Pact scratch symbol. Some said Rawne had learned far more on Gereon than was entirely good for him.

  Mabbon looked at the symbol and nodded.

  The shooter was cautious. He had killed the guard at the door before Rawne’s arrival: cut his throat and left him sitting in his chair. Then he’d gone out onto the walkway and circled around, probably intending to get up and fire at Mabbon from above. The noise of Rawne’s shot had forced him to make his play earlier than he had intended.

  A minute passed, a full minute. It felt like a year to the two men pressed down on the floor behind the cot as they tried not to twitch or breathe. A second minute was almost up before something moved against the light and a figure stepped in through the blown window.

  An Urdeshi trooper, by his clothes and his lasrifle; uniforms and Guard-issue weapons could be stolen. The boots crunched on the broken glass.

  Rawne let him get a metre or so into the room, then fired under the cot. The las-shot clipped the man’s left calf and he toppled with a squeal. Rawne leapt up at once, bounding over the battered cot to finish things. He was hoping to take the man alive for interrogation, but he was also fully prepared to seal the deal with a kill shot if necessary.

  He almost fell off the cot mid-bound as shots tore down from above. A second shooter was firing from high up inside the tower, perched on the rail-less spiral of the stairs.

  Rawne landed on top of the first shooter. It was an accident, but he worked with it. The man fought back. Rawne saw his face, close-up, and recognised him. They wrestled. Shots from above struck the floor beside them. The man had Rawne’s wrist. Rawne couldn’t aim his pistol. The man’s lasrifle, looped around the man’s torso on its strap, was wedged between them.

  Rawne threw a hooking punch. He couldn’t aim with the pistol, so he struck with it. The butt collided with the man’s cheek and snapped his head around, but the impact tore the pistol out of Rawne’s grip, and it went skittering away across the floor.

  More shots struck the ground around them from above. Rawne rolled over hard, dragging his dazed assailant with him, like two lovers tumbling. He couldn’t pull the lasrifle off the shooter because of the strap, but he got his right hand around the barrel to direct it, and his left hand down and low to squeeze the trigger.

  The weapon was still set on full auto. Las-shots hosed up the throat of the lighthouse, deflecting off the curved walls, blowing out chunks of brick and stonework. It wasn’t the cleanest piece of shooting Rawne had ever executed, but he managed to drag the chasing wildfire across the section of screwstair where the second shooter was crouching.

  Hit, though perhaps not fatally, the second shooter yelped and fell. He somersaulted down a dozen steps, cracking off the stone edges, and then grazed against the curve of the wall and flew right off the staircase entirely. He dropped eight metres, straight down, onto the prisoner’s wooden chair, which exploded into kindling and dust under the impact.

  Rawne was up. There was no opportunity for respite. A third assassin had appeared, rushing in through the main doorway. Like the other two, he was dressed as an Urdeshi trooper. He had a lasrifle with a bayonet fixed. He, too, had a face Rawne knew.

  Rawne’s laspistol was out of reach. The lasrifle was tangled around the body of the first shooter on the floor. Rawne went at the third attacker instead, closing the distance between them as fast as he could, ripping out his warknife.

  The third assassin fired, but Rawne’s straight silver had already parried his bayonet and turned the muzzle aside. The shot went out through the blown window. The assassin tried to re-aim, but Rawne fenced with his blade again and deflected the bayonet so that the next shots went clean up the tower space.

  The assassin tried to club Rawne with an underswing of his tilted rifle. Rawne spun his warknife so that the pommel was behind his thumb, then punched the blade sideways, knuckles up. The blow slashed the assassin’s throat, left to right. Blood gouted into the air, as though someone had tossed a beaker of red ink. Rawne ripped back in the opposite direction, and tore a second cut across the man’s torso, right to left. The assassin fell on his knees with a deadweight thump, his lifeblood exiting his body under pressure through the two huge splits. He collapsed onto his face.

  Rawne stepped back, spinning the warknife back upright in his hand, and then swung around, alerted by a sound from behind him.

  The first shooter had got back up on his hobbled leg, raising his rifle to his broken cheek to shoot Rawne in the back. But Mabbon had seized him from behind. The etogaur’s broken manacles were wrapped around the man’s throat, crushing the life out of him. Mabbon’s face was absolutely expressio
nless.

  The man struggled and made a cracked choking noise. Mabbon slammed his face into the stone surround of the blown window and then let the chain go slack, dropping him dead on the floor.

  ‘The timing of your visit was quite fortunate,’ he remarked.

  Rawne nodded, picking up the third assassin’s rifle in case there were any further surprises.

  The three dead assassins all had the same face.

  ‘Rime wants you dead,’ he said.

  ‘Half the sector wants me dead,’ Mabbon replied.

  Rawne shrugged.

  ‘So, did you get some kind of tip-off that Rime was sending his Sirkle after me today?’

  ‘No,’ said Rawne. ‘This was a coincidence. I came here this morning to prove a point.’

  ‘What point?’

  ‘That the Tanith First can protect you better than the S Company details the Commissariat assigns to you. We’ve all used our visits in the last few weeks to test security, to look for weakness, to smuggle things in. Today, I was going to demonstrate that if we could get a weapon inside, so could anybody, and thus convince the Commissariat to assign S Company duties to my platoon so we could take over from the buffoons they’ve been using to watch you.’

  ‘Because Gaunt would be happier that way, because he trusts his own to do the job properly?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Rawne. ‘And it’s Colonel-Commissar Gaunt to you.’

  ‘My apologies,’ said Mabbon.

  Rawne looked at the bodies. Outside, he could hear men approaching, and an alarm started to sound.

  ‘Still,’ he said, ‘as demonstrations go, this proved the point well enough.’

  ‘I’m pleased that my security will be your business for the remainder of my stay here, major,’ Mabbon said.

  ‘The Suicide Kings will look after you,’ said Rawne.

  ‘Suicide Kings? Like the card game?’

  ‘Never mind. It’s a private joke,’ said Rawne. ‘Anyway, there won’t be much of a remainder. That’s why I had to make my point today. It’s also why Rime had to make his move. That suggests he has good intelligence.’

  ‘You’re moving me. We’re going to begin at last?’

  ‘Approval has been granted,’ said Rawne. ‘The mission has been authorised. We make shift at nightfall tomorrow.’

  ‘I take it that when we make shift, we will be en route to Salvation’s Reach?’ Mabbon Etogaur asked.

  ‘That’s classified,’ said Rawne.

  TWO

  Elodie on the Shore

  With just a day to go, the Makeshift Revels were well underway.

  It was all new to Elodie, of course. Everything was new, even her surname. Dutana. Elodie Dutana. It was her mother’s family name, a name that belonged to her but which she had never used. She’d left a number of temporary professional surnames behind her on Balhaut, and taken up her mother’s name to help rid herself of older memories and unsuitable associations.

  She was Elodie Dutana, and she was part of a regimental entourage, and she was the companion of a brave and handsome Imperial Guard officer. It was a new life, and she liked it, and she intended to make the most of it.

  She’d been through the whole process of embarkation once before, back on Balhaut, but it had been a blur, and she hadn’t taken much in. Besides, they had been shipping out to what Ban Daur described as a ‘dispersal point’, not a warzone. There had been no sense of apprehension.

  Now there was. The dispersal point was a city called Anzimar on a planet called Menazoid Sigma. It had taken sixteen weeks on a stinking troop-and-packet ship to reach it from Balhaut, and they had been there eleven months.

  Balhaut, where Elodie had spent the rest of her life, had been a place of towering, majestic cities. It had been the site of the Famous Victory, and though the wounds of war were still healing during her lifetime, and it was still possible to walk past empty lots or the shells of buildings during a day’s business, Balhaut seemed to retain its air of dignity and significance.

  Menazoid Sigma, what little she had seen of it, had little of either. Anzimar was dirty and industrial, and sat on a polluted bay where galvanic reactor plants filled the air with smog. There were twin suns, which was unsettling. Everything was noisy and stained. Everywhere smelled of chemicals. Elodie wasn’t sure if the troop-and-packet ship hadn’t been a preferable place to spend some time.

  Everyone said the same. It was an ugly place, and not a good posting. They were only there for a time, waiting for routing orders to come through. Menazoid Sigma was simply a place to stop and resupply, a place to make ready. Some of the Tanith men, the ones who had served the regiment longest, talked about Menazoid Epsilon, which was apparently a neighbouring system where they had fought many years before. There was no sense at all they were pleased to be back in this part of the Sabbat cluster.

  She had become part of the community attached to the Tanith First regiment. There were at least as many hangers-on following the regiment in supporting roles as there were serving lasmen. Elodie was still getting used to her status, her role, her responsibilities. She was still learning who everyone was. Eleven months, even eleven months spent on a sinkhole like Menazoid Sigma, was enough time to serve as an apprenticeship.

  She was, in effect, an officer’s wife. Her man was Captain Ban Daur, commander of G Company. Like many of the regiment, he was from the industrial world Verghast. He was a good man. Elodie quickly found that her impression of him was one shared by most: Daur was a genuinely good man. He was handsome, intelligent and principled. He wasn’t loved by the men, but he was admired for his fairness and determination. He was honourable, and he could be relied upon. He had prospects for advancement, and they weren’t at all hurt by the fact that, unlike most of the Verghastites serving in the regiment, he was from a good, mid-hive family. He came from breeding. He was not some lowly miner or labourman. Juniper said he was a good catch.

  None of which was why Elodie was with him. She was with him because he was the one, and she’d known that since the moment she’d first seen him that day in Zolunder’s Club on Selwire Street.

  They had not formally married. The matter hadn’t really been discussed. Marriage was permitted, and simply required certain documents and certificates to be signed by the commanding officer. There was no reason to believe that Daur’s commander would refuse his request.

  But they had not got around to it. Just a few weeks spent with the regimental train had shown Elodie that formal bonds were unnecessary. Soldiers understood loyalty, and loyalty was the glue that held everything together. She was Ban’s woman, and everyone respected that. They didn’t need a piece of paper to prove it.

  As an officer’s woman, Elodie entered entourage society at a comparatively high level. She had certain automatic privileges. Her status earned her respect from the other women. She got to decorate Daur’s arm at certain regimental suppers. Officers were courteous to her. Daur’s rank often secured him his own quarters rather than a shared billet, and she got to share that. She was, she knew, envied by some. There was nothing she could do about that. Juniper called her a trophy, whatever that meant.

  The entourage train was a curious community. At the uppermost level were the wives and the women, the wet nurses and the children. A regiment always bred offspring. There were the pleasure girls and the camp followers, the women who were not attached to the regiment by way of blood like a wife or a mother, but by way of reliance. Their living came from the regiment, so they had to follow the regiment wherever it went. And just as their living came from the regiment, so did the livings of the seamsters, the button-makers, the dentists, the potion-grinders, the launderers, the entertainers, the musicians, the portraitists, the cooks, the bottlemen, the victuallers, the errand boys, the knife-sharps, the menders and fixers, the polishers, the cobblers and all the rest, most of whom brought along families of their own. It was an ungainly, parasitic entity that lived so that its host could live, and went with it everywhere, th
e two dependent on one another for survival.

  She spent most days in the entourage camp, talking to the other women. A few, like Juniper, had become her friends and confidantes. They had helped her to find her feet. Juniper had taught her to take certain duties away from Daur’s adjutant. Uniform work was a good one. She could get them cleaned and mended, get the correct one laid out ready for him. She could learn where to go to get the right replacement button or piece of braid, who to ask for the right brass paste, where to take a pair of boots for resoling. Daur had objected at first, saying that it wasn’t her place to wash his clothes. He hadn’t brought her along to shine his boots. She insisted she wanted to. She needed a greater purpose than to look well on his arm by the light of chandeliers. An officer’s woman and his adjutant often developed an elegant partnership. Daur’s adjutant was a man named Mohr. He would advise her, quietly, on expected dress regulations, or send her a note if something was needed from Daur’s quarters. In return, Elodie left service business to Mohr and made sure she wasn’t around or, worse, undressed, in Daur’s quarters when the adjutant took the daily brief. Sometimes, she even advised Mohr of Daur’s mood at the start of a day, a courtesy Mohr often reciprocated at day’s end.

  That morning, there was no question what kind of day it was going to be. Before dawn, the cookfires had lit and the musicians had begun turning up. The Makeshift Revels were a festival, a carnival that marked the departure of a regiment from its station. As soon as rumours began to circulate that a regiment was about to make shift, the revels began. All manner of traders and peddlers came to the shore and set up shop, bringing street entertainers, beggars, whores and, inevitably, thieves. It was the last chance for the soldiers to indulge before departure, the last chance for the entourage to acquire items before the next halt, the last chance for the host town to earn coin from the visiting troops.