Sabbat War Page 6

  ‘The Emperor protects!’ came the chorus.

  ‘To our Lord Executor,’ said Baskevyl.

  ‘Gaunt!’

  ‘And to his Ghosts,’ said Baskevyl, ‘may they live forever.’

  ‘First and only!’ they replied, and drank.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Brostin.

  ‘Your bottle,’ said Cant. He coughed, and then tried it again without the squeak. ‘Your bottle.’

  Brostin was sitting in his chair, out in the pale midday sun on the infirmary terrace.

  ‘Oh,’ said Brostin. ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cant. He glanced back across the terrace. Darra Bray was standing in the doorway behind him, out of Brostin’s eyeline, watching intently. He nodded to Cant encouragingly. He mouthed, ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, give us a sip, then, Cant,’ said Brostin. ‘I can hardly hold the fething thing now, can I? No, I can’t, Cant.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ said Cant. He unstoppered the bottle, and tilted it as he brought it to Brostin’s mouth. It wasn’t very neat, and there was a little spillage, but Brostin smacked his lips.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ murmured Brostin. He grinned. ‘This is what victory feels like. Say hello to Mister Sacra. Why, hello, Mister Sacra.’

  ‘All right?’ asked Cant anxiously.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Proper sacra, eh? From your bottle? The one Bragg gave you, all those years ago?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Brostin.

  ‘Good,’ said Cant. ‘Good.’

  ‘Turns out,’ muttered Brostin, ‘you can when you put your mind to it, can’t you, Cant?’

  ‘Of course I fething can,’ said Cant. He looked back at the doorway, but Bray had gone.

  ‘Give us another sip,’ said Brostin.

  ‘Sure,’ said Cant, tipping the bottle. ‘Is there… is there something wrong?’

  Brostin swallowed and licked his lips. ‘Nope,’ he said.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  Cant stood for a moment, thinking. He winced and braced himself.

  ‘Look,’ he said. He sighed. ‘Look, Brostin. Uh, the thing is… this isn’t your bottle. The bottle Bragg gave you, it got smashed. This is a replacement. I wasn’t going to tell you. I didn’t want to annoy you. But I just can’t lie about it. It isn’t your bottle.’

  Brostin nodded, staring into the distance.

  ‘Of course it isn’t,’ he said. ‘You think I couldn’t tell?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Cant. ‘Oh. Well, uh, I had better be going. I’ll leave this here.’

  He put the bottle down.

  ‘I’ll come back in a day or two,’ he said.

  ‘Hey,’ Brostin called after him.

  ‘What?’ asked Cant. He cleared his throat.

  ‘What?’ he said in a proper voice.

  ‘Give us a light, eh, Callan? Before you go,’ said Brostin.

  WHOSE VOICE IS HEARD NO MORE

  WRITTEN BY GRAHAM MCNEILL

  PREFACE

  Graham’s as much a veteran as I am. We came up through the ranks together. Pals, fellow lasmen, fought side by side in the early skirmishes of Black Library, took our battle scars in the Heresy Wars, won promotions, got our own commands… He’s a good friend, a great writer, and a fellow High Lord (there’s a ceremony, with hats and sashes, a whole thing…). So he’s supremely qualified for a tour of duty in the Sabbat War and, in fact, he’s done it before. His first dazzling visit to the Sabbat Territories was in the first anthology (go read it!).

  When Graham pitched me his idea for this story, I loved it. It was brutal and violent, and packed with all the visceral shooty-death-kill-in-space we have come to expect from him. When he delivered, I still loved it, but I was astonished. There, as expected, was the blood and fury, the down-and-dirty nastiness, the operatic ferocity he does so well. This is, I warn you, a savage tale. But in executing his idea, Graham has pulled off an absolute coup. The story is exactly what he pitched, but at a certain moment (I’m not saying where, no spoilers) he demonstrates extraordinary craft by just easing his foot off the gas, so that what might have been bombastic becomes chillingly clinical and bleakly understated. Just brilliantly effective. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why he’s a High Lord…

  This story is set… somewhere… after Anarch.

  ‘Construction of the mass-conveyor, Vociferator, had been all but complete when the armies of Urlock Gaur swarmed the coreward planets of the Cabal System and captured every ship moored in the graving docks of Caius Innate. Its original shipwrights built it to ferry materiel to Warmaster Macaroth in the Khan Group, but it would go on to serve darker masters.

  First pressed into service as a troop transport for Blood Pact hosts, it violently changed hands at least four times before finally serving the will of Anakwanar Sek.

  Later reports indicated its shipmaster was a being known as Etogaur Shida-kai, a seasoned veteran whose forces carved a bloody path through the circumvallation of Gereon to save hundreds of thousands of newly trained packsons from the overwhelming forces of Imperial liberation.

  With Imperial Army Corps on the offensive throughout the Khan Group and threats from rival magisters mounting, the Anarch’s need for trained troops had never been greater. And so Shida-kai transformed the Vociferator into a battlefield scavenger, following in the wake of Sanguinary conquests and sweeping up prisoners of war to be sworn into the Sons of Sek.

  The devastating events following the Salvation’s Reach attack had driven the Anarch to demand ever more packsons for newly opened fronts in his feud with Gaur, and so Shida-kai brought the Vociferator to the bloody aftermath of the Samid Alpha campaign.

  Their supply lines severed by berserker fleets of the Zho Sanguinary, an entire battle corp had been cut off and fought to bloody submission on the Samid core-world. Archenemy forces slaughtered the surviving Imperial officers and discipline masters, as well as the senior enlisted men, dragging an estimated fifty thousand men and women aboard in chains.

  Imperial relief forces were already moving in-system to cut off its escape, but Shida-kai had no intention of remaining at Samid Alpha. His master’s voice called to him, and so he made all speed for the system’s lesser known Mandeville point.

  Reports from similar encounters with such vessels suggested that every one of those fifty thousand soldiers brought aboard the Vociferator would be given the chance to repudiate their loyalty to the Emperor and pledge fellowship to the Archenemy.

  The vast majority of brave Militarum soldiers would, of course, refuse such a heinous offer and willingly die in agony, but those whose courage was lacking would be cut and branded to be reborn in the Anarch’s host. Accounts from subsequent capture-clades indicated that Shida-kai had promised his master ten thousand packsons, a mighty gift that would make all the difference in the wars yet to come.

  A bold and reckless promise perhaps, but one that – if honoured – would see him rise to command a Sanguinary host of his own. Yet, unknown to Shida-kai, events on Urdesh would soon paradigmatically alter the nature of war in the Sabbat systems.’

  Excerpted from Beyond the Spinward Reaches

  Hunting below the waterline of a voidship was the worst.

  As an environment, it entirely favoured the hunted, possessing innumerable places to hide, and countless bottlenecks to funnel a hunter into an ambush. Add in multiple levels as well as the potential for traps laid by a cunning escapee, and you had an incredibly complicated, fluid environment that required a heightened form of spatial awareness.

  Not that many of the broken souls who managed to break free were in any physical state to fight back, but it paid to be prepared.

  Renn Duraki was Urdeshi born and raised, Militarum trained and equipped. He knew how to fight in steel mazes like this. He’d learned his craft as a Whiteshield in the bombed-out ruins of Orppus and Zarakppan; had honed those skills defending the multilayered structures of Eltath’s dynastic tech-claves, and storming oceanic promethium platforms.


  A starship was never a place of quiet, but the Vociferator was louder than most. Its deck plates vibrated with the heartbeat of its engines, its bulkheads swelled and shrank under the awesome forces beyond the hull, and grunting, howling sermons wailed from the augmitters strung the length and breadth of the ship.

  But below the waterline was something else entirely, where the heaving, mechanical guts of the vessel turned over with a thunder like the interior of a forge-fane turning out beaten metal for the war effort. Duraki’s ears would be ringing for days after this hunt.

  Even over the grinding machine noise, he could still hear the sermons, as if they were conducted and amplified through the metal and grease of the lower decks. Not even the ship-borne vermin that lived in the bilges were spared its jagged cadences.

  The noise made it impossible to track the prey by sound, but neither Duraki or Knox needed to hear their quarry. They’d hunted escapees in this part of the ship so many times they could navigate it blindfolded. They knew its every nook and cranny, the blind alleys, and each location where it might be possible to hide.

  Duraki paused by an oil-slick stanchion, taking a moment to breathe.

  He was exhausted, and had hoped to snatch a couple of hours of rest before Vraed sent him and Knox off to sort out his own damn fool mistake.

  He clenched his fists and loosed a shuddering breath to let out his anger.

  Not all of it. He lived on anger the way some soldiers lived on recaff or stimms.

  It sustained Duraki, gave him a reason to keep fighting; a reason to hold on to himself.

  His anger reminded him of who he was, or at least who he hoped he still was.

  It was hot down here and the air stank of oil that had gone around the ship’s veins more times than any enginseer would certify as healthy. Yellow steam hung in sulphurous veils, and cloudy liquid trickled from the metal-grilled platforms above.

  Knox drew level with Duraki and unclipped the leather mask from his helmet before bending his head back to let the moisture drip into his mouth. Droplets splashed his branded and tattooed skull, running down his cheeks like milky tears.

  ‘Don’t drink that shit, grox-brain,’ said Duraki. ‘Give you cancer.’

  Knox spat. ‘I look like I care?’

  ‘I’ll remember that when your mouth’s lousy with lesions.’

  Knox shrugged at Duraki’s prognosis and said, ‘So why the pause? You got something?’

  Knox was a scowling veteran of Erinyes Secundus, and had fought in the final battles between Mater Heggerol and Lord Militant Caul. He’d lost an arm on the Last Day, and his augmetic replacement was a brutish clawed hand of hissing pipes and sinewy coils. Plated with carved bronze, it was hung with a skull he swore belonged to the man who’d tried to kill him that day.

  Duraki didn’t believe that, but would never say so.

  Knox had already killed two men who’d dared question the truth of his trophy.

  ‘Renn?’ said Knox when he didn’t answer. ‘Do. You. Have. Something?’

  Duraki took another breath and shook his head. ‘No, but I know where he’ll be.’

  ‘Sub-deck Theta, behind the power relays?’

  ‘Yeah, they always run there. I suppose they figure it’ll foul an auspex.’

  ‘This one’s tough, Vraed says. Says he wants this one back alive.’

  Duraki swore. ‘I swear he deliberately allows some of them to break free just to let them think that maybe, just maybe they’ve got a chance of escaping.’

  ‘Sounds like something Vraed would do,’ agreed Knox. ‘Says he maybe got a pistol too.’

  ‘Typical,’ sighed Duraki. ‘Letting a prisoner get hold of a weapon is just the sort of petty, cruel shit I’d expect from one of the Repudiators.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Knox. ‘Better for him now if he puts it in his mouth and blows the back of his head off.’

  Duraki nodded in agreement; it had been Vraed who had taken his repudiation, and the Tongueless Man never let him forget it.

  Since he didn’t fancy drinking the toxic condensate, he took a moment to unclip his Urdeshi-stamped canteen from his belt and take a drink. Common to water drawn from shipboard reservoirs, it was brackish with a metallic tang. He tasted particulate matter, but it was best not to think what that might be.

  ‘Vraed’ll be expecting us back soon with this one,’ said Knox. ‘We got no time for rest.’

  That Knox was edgy at the thought of Vraed’s displeasure was new.

  ‘Since when do you care what Vraed wants?’

  ‘Just don’t want to be on his bad side, you know?’

  ‘Scared he’s going to put you on report?’

  They both grinned, remembering a time when infractions would only result in something minor, like latrine duty or picking up brass on the hard-rounds range.

  ‘He’s spiky, you know? On edge and looking to spill blood. They all are. Like something big’s coming. Can’t you feel it?’ said Knox.

  He glanced over his shoulder as he spoke, like someone might be listening to them over the din of clanking machinery and the droning sermons.

  Duraki allowed that wasn’t an unreasonable suspicion. Besides, he had felt it.

  Discipline aboard the Vociferator had always been brutally harsh, but now even minor misconduct was punished with lethal penalties. The atmosphere was thick with potential violence. Duraki felt it in his every shallow breath and shortened temper. And though he could only understand one word in three droning from the ship-wide augmitters, he sensed the strident, imminent nature of them.

  Everyone in their berth-pit felt it too. Kezra wouldn’t shut up about it, kneading her fists against her temples and rocking back and forward. She’d whisper the same meaningless phrases over and over again, like the pitiful wretches whose minds had snapped in the hell of combat. Shanno wouldn’t stop crying, and even the normally unflappable Vaslov talked darkly of the coming campaigns, like he was a damn Lord Militant and not the former aide to a dead lieutenant.

  Taliam clung to her company’s old vox-caster, forever tinkering in its guts, like she was ever going to pick up another signal. Once an enginseer, always an enginseer…

  So, yeah, Duraki had felt the same thing, but what good would admitting it do?

  ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head, Knox,’ said Duraki. ‘We’ll get this one and bring him back, and if Vraed has anything to say about how long we took, I’ll take that knife of his and cut out his lungs.’

  ‘Sure you will,’ said Knox, clipping his mask back in place. ‘Come on, let’s find this stupid shit and get him back.’

  Duraki had spent three decades of his life fighting in the Urdeshi regiments, cutting his teeth in the Fourth Light before earning his spurs in the Tenth Storm-troop. His finely tuned survival instinct and a determination to simply not die had kept him alive then, and it was keeping him alive in this terrible new reality.

  Averagely tall and thickly built like most Urdeshi soldiers, only the last vestiges of his basic-issue puzzle-camo remained intact. The fabric of his trousers and tunic-coat was little more than a collection of stolen cloth he’d stitched and stapled together. Vaslov had once called him the Patchwork Soldier and since Duraki hadn’t killed him for it, the name had stuck with the others.

  If the quartermaster who’d issued him his combat gear saw his appearance now, he’d recoil in horror and yell for the nearest commissar.

  He and Knox pushed forward, squeezing through the cramped maintenance shafts and tech-crawlways, piercing the gloom with stab-lumens mounted on the sides of their helmets. Red lights strobed through the confines of the tunnels, and flames from the decks above made the liquid on the rumbling pipework glitter like crystals. The engine spaces above were lofty cathedrals to the power of machinery, temples of dark iron and electromotive force, but down here in the hidden guts, the spaces weren’t designed for human scale.

  The power relays were just ahead, and Duraki ducked under a knot of weeping cabl
es, the hairs on his arms standing to attention with loose static charge.

  His eyes narrowed and he turned back to Knox, placing one hand over his mask and pointing with the other.

  Be silent.

  Knox knelt where Duraki was pointing and ran his finger along the jagged edge of a broken pipe. It leaked ammoniac droplets that hissed when they hit the deck plates, and when he lifted his fingers to his mask, they were stained red.

  Blood, he signed, the first symbol they’d learned aboard the Vociferator, before smearing it along the flat of his combat knife.

  Duraki thumbed the catch on his holster and drew his laspistol. Its weight was greater than a standard-issue Militarum one, with a heavier charge pack and stamped out for a larger grip. He liked the extra stopping power, and had learned to compensate for its different balance.

  Ahead, the narrow passage widened out into a high chamber that flickered with unsafe galvanics. Ceramic insulator discs, each tens of metres wide, were stacked one on top of the other in tall columns that rippled with slicks of blue light.

  The blood droplets went right, so Duraki went that way, waving Knox left.

  They moved silently on the outside edge of the crackling pillars of electrical energy, keeping low, looking beneath the insulator towers for any sign of their quarry.

  There… Duraki saw the man, sitting with his back to the wall with one arm wrapped around knees drawn up to his chest. The hand of the other held a few scraps of paper, pages torn from a book, and Duraki saw he was reciting the words written on the pages, though he couldn’t hear them over the crackling hum of the chamber.

  He paused, signing through a gap in the columns to where Knox was matching his pace.

  At the end, by the regulator station. Unarmed.

  Knox nodded in understanding. Corposant danced on the serrated edges of his blade and flickered on the barrel of Duraki’s pistol like it was some child’s novelty weapon.

  The man looked up as they approached, defiant but worn thin, his nerves like glass.