Salvation's Reach

SIXTEEN Countdown

The currents of realspace and the vagaries of the warp had condensed a vast cloud of material in the gravity pit of the Rimworld Marginals. The few pale suns fluttered like candles in the deep ditch of blackness and shone their thin light upon a prodigious pall of flotsam.

At the place known as Salvation’s Reach, the junk belt was at its thickest: a monumental agglomeration of debris almost two hundred thousand kilometres deep at its thickest. Part of it was planetary debris: rocks, dust and other mineral effluent forming solid masses like gallstones or bezoars. Some of it, however, was artificial in origin.

There was tech. There were machine parts. There were the hulks and shells of space machines: ships, barges, carriers, void habitats, supermassives, like some graveyard of wrecks. Craft lost and foundered down through the ages had washed up at Salvation’s Reach, and there they had gathered, collected, mangled each other and, through the action of decay and gravitic pressure, fused into a great knot of material, accumulating like a metal reef.

Some of it was Imperial. Some of it was not. Some of it was of human or human-derivative manufacture. Some of it was not. Some ancient scraps, the carcasses of lost Imperial vessels, were relics of Terran tech that had not been seen for so long they were no longer recognisable to the Adeptus Mechanicus. Old template patterns, unrecoverably deformed, lurked in the silent residue.

Some of it was so old, so worn, so alien, it was impossible to discern the source or original function.

Mechanicus expeditions had been mounted down the years, along with Inquisitorial probe missions, and countless endeavours of salvage and scavenging.

But the Marginals were unstable, inhospitable and remote, and the secrets cast away there were too demanding to recover.

The Armaduke, adjusting its course by gentle realspace burns, slowly crept into this increasingly crowded environment, heading for the solid, planet-sized nugget at its heart.

During the Beati’s original crusade of liberation across the Sabbat Worlds, the Marginals had been the site of a significant fleet action, a turning point in the fortunes of the Imperium that had put the interests of the Sanguinary Worlds and their Archon into retreat. Legend said that Salvation’s Reach had been the name of the Imperial flagship, a flagship that had stood its ground under astonishing enemy fire and died with all hands, holding the line long enough for the Saint’s victory to be achieved. Legend said that the debris accumulated in the junk belt was the wreckage of that titanic fleet action, the battlefield litter of one of the Rim’s greatest realspace engagements.

Other legends said that Salvation’s Reach was the name of a planet, destroyed during that void fight. Different legends said it was the name of the Archenemy supermassive that had finally been scuppered just minutes before it target-locked the Saint’s cruiser.

In Spika’s opinion, none of the legends were any better than half-truths. The debris field included a great deal of space war junk, but it was the accumulated residue of thousands of fights accidentally clustered here, not the devastation left by one fight at this location. Besides, there were too many tech types, too many species variants. Cogitation analysis showed vast differences in the ages and decay of debris samples. Some pieces of scrap were just a few hundred years old. Some were a few hundred thousand.

Spika took the helm himself. This was rare, but his bridge officers did not question it. The insertion run required a shipmaster’s finesse. It needed to be fast and quiet, but their speed was limited by manoeuvrability in the junk zone. Most of the junk could be dealt with by shields, but some pieces were two or three times the size of the Armaduke and required evasion. Obliterating pathway targets was an emergency option only. Spika did not want to draw attention to their approach by disintegrating a looming junk obstacle with battery fire.

Spika was also letting cold momentum take them in whenever possible. With an expert touch, he was allowing the Armaduke to drift from one corrective burn to the next, almost to the point where the old ship began to slide and tumble. Just one more piece of space machine wreckage, drifting towards the core. It was an artful simulation. If the forces dwelling within the metal core of Salvation’s Reach had external sensors or detector grids, the Armaduke’s approach would not be betrayed by a nonballistic trajectory. Spika kept his propulsion systems simmering, ready to breathe and squirt power at short notice to turn the ship or avoid some spinning mass.

Gaunt’s adjutant, Beltayn, had arrived on the bridge and taken up a station near the shipmaster, with access to the strategium. Spika paid him little attention. He seemed a bright enough man, but he was just another drone, and Spika was sure he’d have difficulty picking him out of a squad in a day or two.

What he did pay attention to was the data that Beltayn had brought and loaded, with the help of the hololithic artificers, into the main strategium display. It was the most recent schematic of Salvation’s Reach extracted by mnemonic probe from the mind of Gaunt’s prisoner. This man, this etogaur, had been probed, interviewed and scanned on a daily basis since his capture.

As it had been explained to Spika, the man was a defector. A triple defector. It wasn’t clear, but it seemed that the etogaur had once been an Imperial Guardsman. He had been captured and turned by the forces of the Archenemy, and drafted, because of his training and expertise, into the Archon’s frightful cadre known as the Blood Pact. Later, for reasons Spika didn’t even want to consider, Mabbon Etogaur had renounced that allegiance and broken his pact, joining the Sons of Sek, another martial fraternity. The Sons, as their name suggested, were a consanguinous echelon sworn to the Magister Anakwanar Sek, the Archon’s principal ally and lieutenant.

He was a troubled soul, clearly, a restless heart. How, Spika wondered, did one man contain so much within one lifetime? Bonded into three different institutions that were ordinarily served unto death. Perhaps the original Imperial conditioning had won out in the end, driving Mabbon back to the Emperor despite everything.

If that were true, it was the most stupendous effort of fortitude and devotion. If it were false, they were heading to their deaths.

Mabbon had come to the Imperial side with vital data. He knew that the intelligence and insight he possessed would be the only things that would keep him alive and prevent summary execution. He had data, and he had the means to interpret that data. Despite the psionic scans and mind probes, he had kept certain things obscure. He was smart enough to know that he had to release the information he carried slowly. His life would become redundant the moment he gave it all up. He protected his mind through the conditioned resolve of someone who has both taken and broken the Bloody Pact, and through a variety of engrammatic codings. Before quitting the service of the Archenemy, he had layered into his mind data concerning the Salvation’s Reach facility using a cerebral encrypter; information that could not simply be stripped out, but could only be recovered by methodical and repeated meditation. Since his capture, he had been slowly remembering and building a picture for his Imperium handlers.

The core of Salvation’s Reach was a hulk habitat of considerable size, converted for use as a weapons development facility and manufactory. This facility had originally been set up by the Magister Heritor Asphodel under the instruction of the then Archon Nadzybar. It was remote and inconspicuous, and allowed for the enhancement and testing of weapon systems, be they systems developed by the mad genius Asphodel, recovered xeno artifacts, or gifts from the demented Chaos Gods.

Nadzybar had fallen on Balhaut. Asphodel had perished by Gaunt’s hand on Verghast. The facility remained, inherited by the anarch, Sek. He was using it to strengthen his hand and develop weapon support for his Sons. It was an arsenal, a stockpile, a laboratory. According to Mabbon, Sek felt he should have taken on the mantle of Archon after Nadzybar. The anarch resented Gaur’s rise to eminence and, though obliged by the martial politics of the Sanguinary Worlds to pact with him, had little respect for Gaur’s command of the campaign since Balhaut. Sek envied Gaur’s authority, and he envied Gaur’s revolutionarily disciplined personal army, the Blood Pact. He press-ganged Blood Pact warriors like Mabbon to help him create his own force, the Sons of Sek, and set out to prove that he deserved the mantle of Archon.

It was a compelling claim. The previous decade had shown Urlock Gaur to be a savage chieftain, capable of extreme brutality, even by the standards of the Ruinous Powers. His Blood Pact was certainly supremely effective.

He was also sloppy, and lacked strategic insight. His blunt and ferocious style of warmaking had lost him as much as he had gained. It had driven him back all the way to the Erinyes Group in a series of catastrophic defeats, and only there had he managed to resist Macaroth’s impetus.

In contrast, the Anarch Sek, a far more ingenious and mercurial tactician, had performed superbly along the Crusade’s second front, securing and holding on to the Cabal Systems in the face of the Imperium’s most determined efforts. It was entirely reasonable to expect that if, by means of facilities such as Salvation’s Reach, Sek could show he was a better leader than Gaur, more able, better served and better equipped, the tribes of the Sanguinary Worlds might oust Gaur and look to Sek to take the crown of the Archon and break the stagnation.

Two consequences were clear. Sek’s ambitions had to be stopped. The anarch was so capable that, if finally granted the supreme authority of Archon, he would make the continued prosecution of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade unviable. The Imperium would be forced to retreat and perhaps suspend operations entirely.

More particularly, what better result could the Imperium hope for than to have the fragile partnership of Archon and anarch fracture, and for Gaur and Sek to turn upon each other?

From time to time, Spika glanced at the slowly rotating schematic of Salvation’s Reach projecting up from the main table of the strategium display. As they approached, actual detector readings over-mapped and refined the plans. So far, Mabbon’s intelligence was remarkably precise.

Spika wondered how precise. What might be missing? What might have changed? Mabbon claimed to have visited the facility three times as part of the Sons force, and his memory engram of the structure had been copied from confidential files in the Palace of the Anarch. Details might have altered since then.

Ranged scanning had already indentified the three surface sites, preselected for the strike points: Alpha, Beta and Gamma.

A further question occurred to the shipmaster. It was actually one that had nagged him for days, and which he had been reluctant to voice.

The mission’s credibility rested upon the belief that Mabbon Etogaur had defected back to the Imperial cause; that after taking a path from which there should have been no return, he had rediscovered his loyalty to the Imperium, and brought to them, as an act of contrition and recompense, the means to cripple and disarm their greatest present foe.

What if his defection had simply been back to the Blood Pact, and he was now manipulating the Imperium into doing Urlock Gaur’s dirty work by taking out his chief rival?

Gaunt buckled on his belt, checked his boltpistol, and slotted it into the holster. He finished buttoning up his tunic and then started to fasten on his sword belt.

Maddalena came out of the bedchamber. She had dressed in some expensive, lightweight and ornate partial combat armour.

‘You’re not coming along,’ said Gaunt.

‘I know, but if the fight spills this way, I want to be ready.’

She looked at Gaunt’s power sword. It was clamped in its rack on top of the locker, ready to fit into the scabbard: the power sword of Heironymo Sondar, an emblem of Vervunhive and the great Verghast victory against the Ruinous Powers.

‘You should show him that,’ she said.

‘Felyx?’

‘Yes. You should show him that sword. Explain what you did to get it.’

‘He already knows,’ said Gaunt.

‘Of course he does,’ she said, ‘but that doesn’t mean it’s not important for him to hear you tell it.’

Gaunt took down the sword, activated its field briefly, felt the throb of its power, then deactivated it and sheathed it.

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ he said.

There was a knock at the cabin door. Gaunt had begun to enjoy the way Maddalena’s hand went for a weapon at the slightest cue, hardwired to fight and protect.

‘Get in the bedroom,’ he told her.

She raised her eyebrows.

‘I really don’t think we have time,’ she said.

He laughed, though it felt like too serious a time. She got up and disappeared.

Gol Kolea was waiting at the door, in full kit, weapon slung. His salute let Gaunt know it was an official visit.

‘Regiment battle ready and correct, sir,’ he said. ‘Strike Alpha is assembled on the main excursion deck. Strike Beta awaits you in lateral hold sixteen. Strike Gamma is assembled in lateral hold thirty-nine.’

‘Thank you, major. Time on target?’

‘Estimate is now five hours sixteen, sir.’

‘Have the shipmaster informed we stand ready.’

‘I will.’

‘Anything else to report, Gol?’

Kolea shook his head.

‘The mood’s good,’ he said. ‘I mean, everything considered. All the build-up, the extremity of it. I think the Ghosts have been out of the fight too long. For some, it’s been so long they thought they’d never march again. We need this.’

‘We need to win this,’ said Gaunt.

‘Of course, sir. That’s always true. In the grand scheme of things, we need to win this. But for us, for the regiment, we just need to do it, win or lose. We have to get bloody again or we’ll be good for nothing.’

Gaunt nodded.

‘Point taken. I think we’re ready to get bloody.’

Kolea nodded at Gaunt’s power sword.

‘You might let the boy take a look at that sometime.’

Gaunt frowned sharply. Kolea held up his hands peaceably.

‘I know, I know,’ Kolea said. ‘I’m hardly the one to be handing out advice on being an effective father.’

‘It’s not that,’ said Gaunt. ‘Have you been talking to someone?’

‘No.’

‘You’re not the first person to say that to me.’

Kolea shrugged.

‘The Ghosts haven’t taken to the boy yet, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s a little strange for them, to be honest. But I think they will. I think they’ll respect him because he’s yours. But I think you need to show them you respect him too.’

Gaunt didn’t reply. He put on his cap and picked up his gloves.

‘I’ll walk down with you and inspect the assemblies,’ he said.

Kolea looked back into the apparently empty cabin and pointed with his chin.

‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye first?’ he asked.

Gaunt was forced into a half-smile.

‘Not much gets past you, does it, Gol?’

Kolea laughed.

‘I’m not disapproving, sir. Not my place. And she’s a handsome woman.’

‘She’ll also be here when I get back,’ said Gaunt. He closed the cabin door behind him and set off along the hallway with Kolea.

‘That’s what I like to hear,’ said Kolea. ‘Confidence.’

‘That she’ll still be there?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘That you know you’re coming back.’

The sheer scale of the debris mass became clearer as they approached. The Armaduke was just a speck, a speck amongst billions of specks surrounding the vast bolus of material. Salvation’s Reach was a planetoid, a veritable planet, except that its mass was not spherical. It was a colossal lumpen ingot, flattening out to a disk form at its extremities, where gravity had moulded it.

Through the outer scopes and telepicts, Spika resolved surface detail akin to some ork ships he’d encountered. Except it was put together with less precision. He saw a compressed jumble of mechanical material, like machines mangled and intermingled by an industrial compactor. There were canyons and ravines, sharp peaks and plateaux, deep fissures and almost smooth plains of hull fabric. Swimming through the dense swarms of loose junk, the Armaduke found itself slipping through floating slicks of promethium and other liquids and particulates, substances that had seeped out of the main mass and bled into space.

Lateral holds sixteen and thirty-nine were situated about two-thirds of a kilometre apart on the port side of the Armaduke. They both had large armoured outer hatches equipped with atmospheric field generators. Prior to departure from Menazoid Sigma, the hatch surrounds of both hold apertures had been reinforced and built out with vulcanised buffer collars.

Spika initiated the final approach. Apart from orbital drydocks, the Armaduke had never been positioned this close to a larger object. It felt counterintuitive to him, though every system was green. A shiftship was built for the freedom of the open void, not to snuggle in against the outer layers of a megastructure, like a tick on the skin of a grox. Spika had been obliged to cancel and mute all the proximity alarms, and fundamentally adjust the ship’s inertial stability to counteract the gravimetric load. The ship itself seemed to sense that the manoeuvre was wrong. Like Spika, the Armaduke was reluctant, as if it felt it was being deliberately crashed into the surface of a planet. The hull frame creaked and groaned uneasily. Burn corrections became hair’s breadth subtle.

With a dull and protracted rumble, and an eerie screech of scraping hull that shuddered through the ship and seemed to issue from some immense, echoing cavity, the Armaduke settled against the skin of the Reach.

Spika killed the drives and correction thrusters. He activated the magnetic clamps and inertial anchors.

He turned to Beltayn.

‘Inform your commander that the mission may now proceed,’ he said.

In lateral holds sixteen and thirty-nine, artificer crews scrambled towards the outer doors, erecting protective screens and baffles around what would be their workspace. Several of them waited for the indicator lights on the control panels of the atmospheric field generators to show green. In order to assure the results, they anointed the panels and uttered the correct propitiations. Processors hummed and throbbed. Machinery was rolled forwards in front of the hatch gates, and power cables were played out. Servitor crews advanced and stood ready with pressure hoses that fed from the water reservoirs inside the Armaduke’s hullskin, water that was dark and sludgy with ice.

Behind the protective barriers in the main body of each holdspace, assembled with their equipment and weapons, the strike teams sat and waited. Some spoke quietly, some rechecked their kit or specialist equipment, some muttered blessings to themselves or smoked lho-sticks, some caught catnaps.

Some watched the artificers at work. The Ghosts were dubious. This wasn’t their field of specialism. Every now and then, some pained metallic squeal would echo through the ship, a grinding shriek from where the cruiser’s hull rested against the bulk of the scrap-metal world they had docked against. Ghosts jumped, made the sign of the aquila, and looked around for the source of the noise.

Just over twenty long, edgy minutes after the Armaduke snuggled itself in against the Reach, tell-tales flashed green in lateral sixteen and thirty-nine almost simultaneously. Gaunt had just arrived in sixteen, where Strike Beta had assembled. At a nod from the chief artificer, Gaunt took a handset from the waiting vox-officer and called through to Major Pasha in lateral thirty-nine.

‘We have green here,’ she reported.

‘Fields stabilised,’ Gaunt agreed. ‘Give the order to open your hatch.’

‘The Emperor protects,’ Petrushkevskaya replied.

Gaunt looked at the chief artificer.

‘Open,’ he said.

The chief artificer nodded, turned and signalled to the bay gallery, where cargo officers activated the hatch gate controls.

There was a gentle clatter. Gaunt turned, and saw that Strike Beta had risen to its feet, en masse, weapons ready.

He knew full well that an almost identical scene was playing out in lateral thirty-nine.

There was thump, a hiss of compression seal pistons, a whirr of retractor motors, and the hold’s massive outer hatch began to open. Effectively, the hull-side wall of the bay slid to one side.

Light from the hold revealed what was behind it: another wall, blackened and scabbed, worn by age and scoured by the void, lumpy and corroded, fused and blistered. This was the outer skin of the Reach.

Alarm lights flashed on and off, warning that the atmospheric field surrounding the docking buffers was fighting to maintain a seal. There was no danger of explosive decompression into the hard vacuum outside, but Gaunt could feel the sharp breeze of the slow leaks: air rushing out around the inexact seal.

‘Can you stabilise it?’ he asked.

The artificers were already making adjustments to the shape and size of the atmospheric field via the control station. Further prayers of efficacy were offered to the machine spirits. Slowly, the lights stopped winking and the sucking air leaks died away.

Silence. Silence apart from the very distant creak and squeal of metal on metal.

Gaunt walked past the protective screens right up to the face of the Reach’s exposed outer skin. It was ugly, like blackened metal scar tissue, ridged and contorted beside the dank but clean hold structures of the Armaduke.

Gaunt took off his glove, put out his bare hand, and touched the alien metal. It was only just beginning to warm from the ambient heat of the hold’s atmosphere. Gaunt felt an eternity of void cold, the legacy of airless dark. He felt the chill contours of threats and promises.

He looked at the chief artificer.

‘Prepare to cut it,’ he ordered.

The vox-officer was standing by. Gaunt relayed the same order to Major Pasha, and then switched channels to speak to Shipmaster Spika.

‘Bridge.’

‘Shipmaster, please signal Strike Alpha to launch. The order is given.’

‘Understood.’

Launch Artificer Goodchild placed the vox-horn back on its hook, stood up and walked down the metal gangplank into his supervision gallery. The brass control board had been purified and blessed, and the votive seals, threads of inscribed paper attached by wax and red ribbons, had been removed from the lever controls and dials.

Goodchild had only to say one word. His servitors and technicians set to work. Greased pistons began to elevate sections of the deck. Exhaust vents clattered open. The main and secondary lighting systems of the principal excursion deck dimmed to cold blue and yellow hazard lamps began to flash. There was a pressure drop as the main airgates and outer space doors opened, hingeing out and away like the petals of a flower. The atmospheric envelope adjusted accordingly. Field strength peaked. Voices murmured all around him: the augmetic drone of servitors mindlessly pronouncing streams of technical calibration figures, and flight crew adepts monotonously repeating the catechisms of service and duty.

On the main deck below, gangs of ratings, many of them bulk-grown abhuman serfs, hauled away the cable lines and mooring wires, cranking them into the under deck drums. The first six boats on the primary landing were laden and waiting, lift systems running. Through-deck hoists were already lifting the next wave of craft up from the parking hangar. It was unusual for small craft like Arvus lighters and Falco atmospherics to be hoisted or repositioned with personnel on board, but the shipmaster had expressed to Goodchild the importance of rapid launch. Laden with lasmen and assault equipment, the landing craft were being loaded into the launch platform like ammunition into a gun.

The first craft lifted and began to accelerate towards the space doors. It was the heavyweight giant that Goodchild had seen aboard at Tavis Sun, a martial brute in the colours of the Silver Guard. Its pattern designation was Caestus, an assault ram vehicle of ancient Adeptus Astartes design, a machine built for boarding actions. Its rear burners lit hot yellow as it cleared the airgate and then turned wild green as it slipped through the hazy edge of the atmospheric field into hard space.

Behind it came the first of the assault carriers: Arvus-pattern craft, both long and standard body variants, followed by four Falco boats. They launched in pairs, their engines making shriller, thinner sounds compared to the guttural throb of the Caestus. The engine sounds died away as soon as the small ships left the atmospheric field.

The second launch wave was already sliding onto the ramp.

Goodchild walked back to his vox station and lifted the horn.

‘We have launch conditions,’ he reported. ‘Launching in progress.’

Vox mic held ready in his hand, Beltayn watched the shipmaster and the other senior bridge officers gathered around the glowing strategium console. On the hololith, little patches of lights were spitting out of the imaged Armaduke, and whipping away in formation around the seam of the Reach structure. Spika had brought the resolution up, so not all of the Reach was being projected. Beltayn saw the little clusters of fast lights, like neon seeds, zipping across the ragged topography of the Reach’s hull away from the Armaduke, flying very low, hugging the terrain to avoid detection. Beltayn noticed the way Spika was drumming his fingertips on the handrail of the strategium as he watched. There was a slightly sour odour on the bridge, the smell of adrenaline. It wasn’t just the stressed crew: bio-wired into the neurosystems of the ship, the abhumans and serfs were reacting in tension too.

The ship itself was nervous.

‘Strike Alpha eight minutes to target,’ intoned one of the seniors.

Spika nodded. His fingertips drummed.

At the helm of the Caestus, Pilot-servitor Terek-8-10 maintained a steady course. His biomechanical hands rested on the helm controls, though he was operating the heavy machine through the neural impulse linkage of his augmetic plugs. Manual control was for emergencies. The chambers of his hearts thrilled to the output of the engines either side of him. Forward view through the small window port was restricted. He was following a tight course through the broken geography of the target area’s surface plotted by auspex and displayed via hololithic router. The Caestus was leading the assault flight, twisting around slopes of junk, banking over torn pylons, hugging the floors of metal ravines and chasms, even flying under accidentally created bridges and outcrops of shredded machinery.

Rear-projecting auspex showed the troop landers tight on his tail, following his lead. Terek-8-10 was also detecting steady vital readings from the three individuals strapped into the inertial suppression clamps in the armoured compartments of the twin hull booms below and ahead of him.

The vitals were impossibly slow, as though the individuals were so calm they were almost asleep.

Terek-8-10 woke up the weapon servitors and their fragile little sinus rhythms lit up alongside the three slow, heavy pulses.

‘Four minutes,’ the pilot-servitor intoned, each word clean and separate, each word significant.

In lateral sixteen, Gaunt watched the artificers roll the Hades breaching drill into position. Its vast cutting head was just a hair’s breadth from the face of the Reach’s exposed hull. The last few blessings were being made over its systems.

The chief artificer glanced at Gaunt.

Gaunt held up three fingers.

Three minutes remaining.

The Arvus was buffeting hard. Freak electromagnetics plagued the ravines and canyons scoring the metal skin of Salvation’s Reach. It wasn’t the most pleasant ride Gol Kolea had ever known.

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.