The cargo hold of an Arvus lighter offered no visibility and precious little comfort. The bare metal box had been fitted out to afford bench-seating for combat-ready troops and enough room to stow their equipment. They were strapped in along facing rows, backs to the hull, feeling every jolt and shake down their spines. There were no windows, just a half-slit through to the tiny helm compartment. The Arvus was a workhorse, designed for loading and lugging. Comfort and luxury had never been considerations.
Kolea shifted in his seat. He had his lasrifle braced upright between his knees, and the harness of the rebreather mask buckled around his neck. Because of the way the boarding shields had been stowed, there was scarcely any room for his feet.
He was right by the rear drop-hatch, ready to lead the way out. He looked back along the cargo hold. Members of C Company were enduring the ride, most looking straight ahead or down at the deck: Caober and Wersun; Derin; Neith, Starck and the flametrooper Lyse; Bool and Mkan with the .30.
Facing him with his shoulder to the hatch was Rerval, Kolea’s company adjutant.
‘Two minutes,’ said Rerval. ‘We’re almost there.’
‘Yes,’ said Kolea. ‘Things will be so much better once they’re shooting at us.’
The liquid dripping from the readied hoses stank of promethium and rust. The smell reminded Ban Daur of the rain that used to fall across Hass West and the fortress tops of Vervunhive. Dirty rain, soiled by the metal factories and engineering fab plants.
He walked the length of lateral thirty-nine, reviewing the squads of Strike Gamma. The Ghosts were drawn up behind the line of protective barriers. There was edginess. Half of the assembled strength was Verghast, the influx from Major Petrushkevskaya’s company. Despite their common bonds and origins, these troops had not fought alongside the Ghosts before, and they had yet to prove themselves worthy of the name.
He nodded to Vivvo, to Noa Vadim, to Pollo and Nirriam and Vahgner. He stopped to speak to Seena and Arilla with their heavy .30. He paused to exchange a joke with Spetnin, Major Pasha’s number two.
Maggs was waiting with Haller, Raglon and the first-wave shooters, Merrt, Questa and Nessa. The marksmen carried their longlas pieces over their shoulders. The whole group was watching Daur’s adjutant, Mohr, who was kneeling beside his voxcaster, listening.
‘All set?’ Daur asked.
‘Have been for months now,’ replied Haller.
Daur smiled. He’d known Haller a long time. They’d come up through Vervunhive Defence together. Haller undoubtedly recognised the rain-smell of Hass West too. Haller had never had the drive and ability to excel like Daur, but Daur knew how hard Haller had been training in the past few months to secure the leadership of one of Gamma’s clearance teams.
Major Pasha joined them, with Hark. The commissar was setting his cap just right, ready for business. Daur noticed that the heavy leather holster of Hark’s plasma pistol was unbuttoned.
‘One minute,’ said Mohr.
The lighting in the Caestus’s hull boom compartments turned red. Secured in their clamps, Holofurnace, Sar Af and Eadwine barely acknowledged the notification.
But steel-cased fists locked around the grips of weapons.
Pilot-servitor Terek-8-10 checked his pict-screens. The final few seconds of data were streaming in, with actual real-time auspex scans and detection results superceding the predicted data and less accurate distance scans.
The Primary Ingress Target had, after detailed analysis, been designated prior to launch. It was a location that appeared on the distant resolutions to be a major airgate or docking hatch, one of the main entries to the Salvation’s Reach facility. Now, as they were closing, the systems were showing the hatch to be a largely defunct ruin, part of the junked architecture. Thermal and energetic traces were showing a smaller airgate structure, still large enough for bulk cargo handling, to be the most recently and regularly used. This second gate was down and to the left of what the plan insisted should be the Primary Ingress Target. Density penetration scans showed the Primary to be both reinforced and back-filled with rubble and debris.
Terek-8-10 didn’t make a conscious decision. The pilot-servitor processed the revised data and adjusted his mission profile for optimum effect. A deft manual adjustment, sixteen seconds from contact, steered the Caestus down and to the left. The secondary airgate locked up as the newly selected target, fixed in the crosshairs dead centre of the data-plates and monitors. It looked like a cliff-face, a cliff-face made of dark, stained and pitted metal.
Terek-8-10 triggered the afterburners.
The short-fire rocket burners lit, and the Caestus lurched as though it had been kicked from behind by a giant. Eight seconds from the
cliff-face, the missile batteries mounted on the Caestus’s wings unloaded their blistering shoals of micro-missiles. At the same time, the magna-melta cannon mounted between the ram booms discharged.
The radiant blast of the heat cannon puckered and warped the metal cliff face. The airgate hatch structure bubbled and liquefied, spurting a geyser of white-hot blobs into the void like silt disturbed from the bed of a pond. The epicentre of the hit was left as an oozing sore of white hot metal, a glowing crater that almost penetrated the reinforced hull skin.
Less than a second later, the spread of Firefury micro-warheads impacted, a saturation strike that annihilated the already compromised fabric of the airgate.
There was a light flash, which strobed ultra-rapidly with the multiple detonations, and the gate shredded: first blown in, and then instantly ejected as the pressurised bay behind it abruptly decompressed. In the last few seconds, the Caestus found itself flying into a swirling and exhaling fireball and a storm of debris that hailed off its prow shields and armoured hull, nicking and gouging and scraping. Terek-8-10 held the course firm, despite the monumental turbulence. Both visually blinded and scanner-blanked by the blast’s extreme energy flare, Terek-8-10 fired the heat cannon twice more anyway, lancing devastating energy into the open wound of the blown-out docking bay.
The last seconds ran out. Their flight time was used up, with less than a single second of variation between predicted passage duration and actual elapsed time.
The Caestus was inside Salvation’s Reach.
It punched through the expanding fireball, burning into the hold-space at maximum velocity. The docking bay area was of considerable size. The explosive decompression had thrown it into utter disarray. Half-glimpsed dock servitors, loading vehicles, cargo crates, even cartwheeling personnel, came spinning at them, carried by the riptide of escaping air. Some of them were on fire. A small lighter craft tumbled at them, snagged off a crane gantry, inverted, and met the starboard boom of the charging Caestus. The ram tore it in two, and it shredded back and away over the ram’s drive section. The mangled boat bounced and rebounded off the dock ceiling, wing pieces and engine blocks disintegrating and scattering.
Terek-8-10’s blind cannon blasts had gouged the interior of the bay, turning another two moored shuttles to molten slag. Two or three of the micro-warheads had also gone into the hangar, unimpeded by any obstacles. They detonated deep inside as they finally met solid objects. The Caestus tore through the gantry frame of a cargo loader, folding the girders and scaffolded structure around itself like a garland. The dragged framework ripped two small landers from their ceiling rack moorings.
The Caestus had almost run out of space. The far end of the docking bay was another gate hatch. Automatically triggered, blast-proof door skins were closing across the scored and grubby hatch.
Terek-8-10 fired the cannon, roasting a spear of energy out in front of the Caestus. The afterburners had finished their jolt, but the pilot-servitor fired them again, using reserve fuel, grabbing a last little bit of force and momentum.
The inner doors did not explode. They buckled under the melta-fire, forming pustules and scabs of molten chrome that spalled flakes of metal like dead skin. Still trailing shreds of twisted girderwork behind it like streamers,
the Caestus hit the inner doors.
Now they exploded.
The impact stove the doors in. It folded one horizontally and punched it clean out of the hatch frame. The other, weakened more extensively than the first by the melta damage, ruptured like wet paper or damaged tissue, spattering the Caestus with superheated liquid metal.
The Caestus came through the doors into the secondary dock, bringing most of them with it. It had lost a considerable amount of momentum. Part of its port wing had been stripped away by the collision. Stability was impaired. Further explosive decompression caused gale-force cross-winds to wrestle with the heavy craft. The prow shields that had protected it thus far had finally burned out and failed.
It was more projectile than vehicle. It bore on, demolishing, one after another, three lighter shuttles that were suspended side by side above the dock floor on mooring clamps. Terek-8-10 saw sensor displays that told him the Reach’s vast atmospheric processors were running at hyperactive levels as they attempted to compensate for the catastrophic pressure loss. Field generators were fighting to establish a cordon against hard space and seal the deep, gaping wound in the Reach’s environmental integrity.
That was good. The Archenemy was too concerned about retaining its environment to consider the consequences. Atmospheric stability meant the Imperial Guard components following the Caestus in would be able to deploy directly.
The Caestus was almost out of room in the secondary bay. Terek-8-10 fired the magna-melta again and softened the end of the compartment enough to stab the ram-ship through it. The boom arms punched through hull plate, rock infill and inner skin compartment lining. This time, it left most of its other wing behind. Clipped and injured, ceramite armour blackened with firewash and molten metal, it tore through into the next chamber, an engineering depot. Almost all of its effective momentum had been robbed away.
Terek-8-10 stabilised the shuddering craft, slamming it sideways into the casing of a bulk processor as he fought it to a halt. He pulled the lever that dropped the boarding ramps.
‘For the Emperor,’ he howled in an amplified augmetic monotone. ‘Kill them!’
Tell-tale lights on his main console showed him that, down in the transport compartment, three inertial suppression clamps had been released.
SEVENTEEN
Boarding Action
‘They’re in,’ said Beltayn, over the vox. ‘Contact reported.’
‘Begin cutting!’ Gaunt ordered. The artificers nearby had been poised for the order. The blessed engine of the ugly Hades breaching drill thundered into life, and the oily beast, like some giant promethean beetle from the lightless depths beneath some world’s rocky crust, was coaxed forwards. Its heavy tracks clattered on the deck plates of lateral sixteen.
The Hades was a siege engine, a boring drill designed for sapping and trench warfare. Gaunt had seen the engineers of Krieg deploying such devices to great effect when he was still a cadet. Cutting through what amounted to the hull of a starship was not a conventional use, but it was the quickest and most expedient way in that the tactical planners had been able to devise. The Hades’s huge cutting head, a four-part breaching instrument of interlocked, diamantine-tipped rotary power cutters, was mounted on the front of the tank chassis and adjusted by a powerful frame of piston drivers. The power cutters bit from the outside in, so that shredded material passed into the maw between the cutters, down a conveyer belt that ran through the middle of the machine like a digestive tract, and was ejected as spoil through the rear. Seen front-on, the Hades resembled the grotesque concentric mouthparts of some deep sea sucker fish, with rows of teeth surrounding a funnel throat. Deep in that throat, above the belt, was a melta-cutter positioned to weaken and blast the target solids into consumable slag.
The chassis snorted black exhaust fumes. The cutter bits were spinning at maximum cycle. The operator triggered the melta-array and fired several searing blasts into the skin of the Reach.
The skin began to buckle and deform, filling the hold space with a stink of pitch and scorched metal. Then the whizzing teeth bit in.
The noise was painfully loud. It was the shrill scream of a high-speed drill, but mixed with the deep throb and roar of bulk industrial machinery. The heat blasts had softened the hull skin enough for the grinding, rending drill heads to find purchase. Hull metal wailed as it was abraded away. Fine scrap began to tumble out of the belt ejector, shavings polished almost silver by the rotary teeth. Fine dust and smoke rose off the power cutters, which were already super-heating from friction. The crew members standing by unlocked their pressure hoses and began to spray the advancing head with jets of dank water. The Hades operator still applied ferocious heat using the melta, because it was essential for the hull fabric to be soft enough for the teeth to bite. But it was also essential to keep the power cutters cool enough not to fuse and, more importantly, damp down and emulsify the clouds of micro-fine, ultra-sharp spalling that was coming off the cut in clouds like dust. If that got into eyes or throats, if that was inhaled into lungs, it would kill a man through catastrophic micro-laceration. The cooked mineral stink was bad enough. Occasionally, a flaw or imperfection in the hull fabric caused a large shard of debris to splinter off and be flung out by the spinning teeth. These pieces pinged and cracked off the protective screens and baffles. Gaunt knew what the Ghosts behind him were thinking. It sounded exactly like small-arms fire spanking off trench boarding.
One of the operators was struck by a piece of flying debris. It knocked him off his feet, but he got back up again, bruised and shaken. A few seconds later, another operator was hit by a sharpened sliver that went clean through his body armour and into his torso above the right hip. Colleagues pulled him clear, but he was already bleeding out by the time they got him to the hold doorway where the medicae teams were waiting.
‘How thick?’ Gaunt yelled over the howl of the drill.
‘Density scans show just over three metres,’ replied the chief artificer.
‘Time?’
‘Unless the composition changes, eighteen minutes.’
‘How long?’ asked Daur, shouting over the scream of the Hades in lateral thirty-nine.
‘Twenty-eight minutes,’ replied the head of the artificer crew.
‘Strike Beta reports a significantly lower estimate than that,’ said Major Pasha.
The artificer’s face was half-hidden by a grimy protective mask.
‘The alloy composite in this location is appreciably harder,’ he explained. ‘I have compared assay reports from the lateral sixteen cut. There is nine per cent more duracite in this location.’
Major Pasha looked at Daur.
‘We’ll be through when we’re through,’ she said over the noise of the cutting. He nodded glumly.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
‘Alpha,’ said Daur.
They emerged from the Caestus into a wracked, unstable atmosphere with flames leaping around them. Several huge fires blazed through the core of the engineering depot, and sections of the roof were collapsing because of the entry wound made by the boarding ram. Some form of fuel oil had spilled from a punctured tank and covered the deck. It was alight, like a field of bright corn: yellow flames, and their reflection in the black mirror of the oil.
Eadwine, Holofurnace and Sar Af strode through the fire, heedless. Their antique, crested helms made them seem especially tall; their ornate and bulky armour gave them an even more unnatural bulk. Flame light glittered off their gilded pectoral eagles and their barred faceplates, and sparkled off their massive half-aquila boarding shields. All three had their boltguns in their right fists, drawn up to rest on the right-angled corners of their shields.
They began to fire as they advanced, gaining speed, moving from a stride to a bounding jog. Bolt rounds banged out, destroying sensors, auto-defence units, potential items of cover. Spent shell cases tumbled in the air.
Behind them, the Caestus was disgorging the rest of its cargo, the weapon servito
rs. Two were tracked units with multi-laser mounts, the other four were perambulatory units, burnished silver and chrome in the colours of Eadwine’s Chapter. They had faces of etched silver, wrought in the shapes of skulls, or at least the skulls of angelic beings. Their upper limbs were weapons mounts: autocannons, heavy bolters, rocket launchers. They came through the lakes of fire as obliviously as the Space Marines, advancing like reaping machines through tall crops, blasting as they came. Energy beams seared down the length of the depot space, and bright tracer shots stitched the air. Terek-8-10’s directive scans had already identified the three access points at the far end of the chamber and fed them to the Space Marines via their visor displays.
‘No human bio-traces in active opposition,’ Terek-8-10 reported over the vox link. ‘Several hundred detected trying to flee the chamber. Several dozen more detected beneath debris or rubble, fading.’
Almost immediately, as though the pilot-servitor’s report had been tempting fate, the boarding force started to take fire. It rained down from a steep angle, bursting off boarding shields and the polished chromework of the gun-servitors. Sar Af took one kinetic blow across the side of his helm from a glancing shot that was hard enough to make him grunt.
Terek-8-10 was dismayed.
‘Auspex does not read human bio-traces in opposition,’ he declared.
‘It does not have to be human to want us dead,’ replied Eadwine.
He brought his shield up like a pavise, and fended off the rain of barbs. The other Space Marines did the same.
Sar Af noted the context of the impacts, the shrapnel marks and cuts, analysing instantly.
‘Flechette rounds,’ he said.
They sourced the origination, post-human eyes hunting the dark for muzzle flash, up in the chamber roof, up the dense framework of machinery and gantries.
Movement.
‘Loxatl,’ Eadwine reported. He had clearly glimpsed one of the long, sinuous xenos reptiles. The other Space Marines didn’t reply. They were too busy trying to kill the creatures.