02 - Blood Reaver Read online

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  BLOOD REAVER

  Night Lords - 02

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  For Vince Rospond, with sincerest thanks, from Aaron and Katie.

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants—and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  Prologue

  A CRUCIFIED ANGEL

  The warrior turned his helm over in his hands. Gauntleted fingertips stroked along the dents and scratches marring the midnight ceramite. The faceplate was painted white with an artisan’s care, in stylised mimicry of a human skull. One scarlet eye lens was ruined, cobwebbed by cracks. The other stared, dispassionate in deactivation, reflecting the darkening sky above.

  He told himself that this wasn’t symbolic. His helm’s ruination didn’t reflect the damage done to his Legion. Even as he quenched the notion, he wondered from whence it came. The war had a proven and profane habit of fanning the embers of melancholy, but still. There were limits.

  The warrior took a breath, seeing inhuman creatures dance and bleed behind his closed eyes. He’d been dreaming of the eldar lately, for months before setting foot on this desolate world. Thousands of them: spindly things with gaunt faces and hollow eyes, aboard a burning ship of black sails and false bone.

  “Soul Hunter,” someone called. His brother’s voice, making the name somewhere between a joke and a title of respect.

  The warrior replaced his helm. One eye lens flickered live, bathing the vista in the killing-red of his targeting vision. The other showed angry grey static and the distracting after-images of visual input lag. It still echoed with a grainy and colourless view of the setting sun a few moments after he’d turned away from it.

  “What?” the warrior asked.

  “The Angel is breaking.”

  The warrior smiled as he drew the gladius sheathed at his shin. Fading sunlight flashed off the blade’s edge as the steel met cold air.

  “Glorious.”

  Crucifying one of the Imperial Astartes had been a delicious conceit, and served well as a means to an end. The warrior hung slack from his bonds, bathed in pain but surrendering no sound from his split lips. The Emperor’s “Angels of Death”, the warrior smiled. Stoic to the last.

  With no iron spikes to hand, getting him up there required a degree of improvisation. Ultimately, the leader ordered his men to bind the Angel to the hull of their tank by impaling the prisoner’s limbs with their gladii.

  Blood still dripped to the decking in liquid percussion, but had long since ceased to trickle with rainwater eagerness. The Adeptus Astartes physiology, despite its gene-written immortality, only held so much blood.

  Beneath the crucified captive, a helm rested in repose. The warrior dismissed another unwelcome tide of reflection at the sight of a helm so like his own but for the colours of allegiance and the bonds of a bloodline. With no real venom, he crushed it beneath his boot. How keen and insipid, the tendrils of melancholy lately.

  The warrior looked up, baring features destroyed by mutilating knives. His armour was ceramite—halved with rich blue and pure white—pitted and cracked around the impaling short swords. His face, once so grim and proud, was a skinless display of bare veins and bloody, layered musculature. Even his eyelids had been cut away.

  “Hail, brother,” the warrior greeted the captive. “Do you know who we are?”

  With the angel broken, a confession took no time at all. To speak the words, he came up close, the purred question rasping through his helm’s vocabulator into the air between them. The warrior’s faceplate was almost pressed to the Angel’s flayed features—two skulls staring at one another as the sun went down.

  “Where is Ganges?”

  As his brothers prepared, the warrior watched the distant fortress burning on the horizon, paying heed to how it devoured the world around it. A sprawl of towers and landing platforms—its dark mass ate the land while its smoking breath choked the sky. And yet it offered so little of worth when laid bare to plundering hands. Why attack a world if the one node of resources was already drained dry? Piracy without profit was nothing more than begging.

  Undignified. Oh, yes. And embarrassing.

  The warrior stared at its distant battlements—a meagre stronghold on a lifeless world, claimed by a thin-blooded Chapter calling itself the Marines Errant. A raid for weapons, for supplies, for precious, precious ammunition… wasted. The Chapter’s own crusades bled their reserves to nothing, leaving naught but scraps for the Eighth Legion’s grasping hands.

  The fortress fell within a day, offering as little sport as plunder. Servitors and robed Mechanicum acolytes tore through the databanks in the nigh-abandoned stronghold, but discovered only what every warrior already knew: the raid was a waste of their diminishing ammunition reserves. The Marines Errant no longer stored their secondary armoury here.

  “Things have changed since we last sailed these reaches of the void,” the Exalted growled to his command crew. The confession pained him, pained them all. “We have hurled our last spears… to conquer a husk.”

  Amidst the bitterness of desperation and disappointment, the embers of possibility still burned. One word cycled through the streams of data, over and over again. Ganges. Representing the ties in this sector of space between the Marines Errant and the Martian Mechanicus, a deep-void outpost was responsible for a significant supply of raw material for the Chapter’s armoury. The Marines Errant, so proud in their armour of oceanic blue and marble white, maintained order within the subsector by vigilant destruction of human and alien pirates. In protecting Mechanicus interests, they earned the allegiance of Mars. In earning such unity, they garnered a share in the Mechanicus’ significant munitions production. A circle of symbiosis, fuelled by mutual interest.

  The warrior admired that.

  What mattered most was this deep-space refinery’s location, and that eluded all who sought to find it. Sealed behind unbreakable encryptions, the only answer that mattered remained known to none.

  The few prisoners taken from the hollow monastery offered little in the way of information. Human attendants, lobotomised servitors, Chapter serfs… None knew where Ganges lay in the heavens. What few Imperial warriors had def
ended this worthless world died to their brothers’ bolters and blades, embracing their deaths as honourable sacrifice rather than risk capture and desecration.

  A single defender yet drew breath. The warrior dragged him onto the ash plains to be flayed under the setting sun.

  Even now, the Errant still drew breath, though not for much longer. He had revealed all the Eighth Legion needed to know.

  Ganges. A raid there would reap much richer rewards.

  In orbit, the Vectine system’s sun was a vast orb of adrenal orange, a colour of deep fire and desperate strength. On the surface of the third world, it was a weeping eye, closed by the smog that blocked most of its brightness. The warrior watched it finally set behind the devastated stronghold.

  A voice came to him, carried on the crackling waves of the vox network.

  “Soul Hunter,” it said.

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “Sorry. Uzas is eating the Errant’s gene-seed.”

  “The Errant is dead? Already?”

  “Not quite. But if you wish to execute him yourself, now is the time. Uzas is making a mess.”

  The warrior shook his head, though there was no one to see it. He knew why his brother was asking: the Errant had been the one to break his helm, firing a bolter at close range during the assault and savaging the faceplate. Vengeance, even vengeance this petty, was tempting.

  “We have all we need from him,” the warrior said. “We should return to the ship soon.”

  “As you say, brother.”

  The warrior watched as the stars opened their eyes, scarcely piercing the dense cloud cover, little more than pinpricks of dull light. Ganges was out there, and with it, the chance to breathe easily again.

  PART ONE

  UNBOUND

  I

  ECHOES

  The ship was quiet as she walked its cobwebbing corridors.

  Not quite a lack of sound, more a presence in itself that ghosted down the black iron hallways. Three days had passed since the Covenant of Blood last sailed under power. Now it coasted through space, its decks cold and its engines colder. The hunt, they called it, in their whispering tongue. This ethereal drift through the void, sailing in powerless silence closer to the target, seen and heard by none. The hunt.

  Octavia called it waiting. Nothing was more tedious to a Navigator. The hull still creaked as abused steel settled, but the sounds of the crew were more muted than ever before. So few remained now.

  One of her attendants trailed at her heels as she walked from her chamber. He was a scruffy, robed thing, more than half of his hunched form given over to crude bionics.

  “Mistress,” he whispered over and over. “Mistress, mistress. Yes. Mistress. I follow mistress.” He didn’t seem able to lift his voice above a whisper.

  Octavia was learning to ignore the annoying creatures. This one was one of the ugliest in the pack of augmented men and women that professed to serve her. It stood only as high as her shoulder, with its eyes sewn shut by thick, crude stitching. Whatever modifications were done to its body whirred, clicked, ticked and tocked as it loped along with a hunchback’s gait. “Mistress. Serve mistress. Protect mistress. Yes. All of these things.”

  It regarded her with an eyeless face, looking up and seeing her through means she wasn’t sure she wanted to understand. Bizarrely, he looked hopeful. He seemed to want praise for shuffling along by her side and occasionally bumping into walls.

  “Shut up,” she told him, rather politely given the circumstances.

  “Yes,” the hunched man agreed. “Yes, mistress. Quiet for mistress. Yes. Silence now.”

  Well, it’d been worth a try. “Please go back to the chamber,” she said, and even smiled sweetly. “I will return soon.”

  “No, mistress. Must follow mistress.”

  Her reply was an unladylike snort as their boots continued to clank along the hallway decking. Their images walked with them as they passed a hull section of reflective steel. Octavia couldn’t resist a glance at herself, though she knew she wasn’t going to like what she saw.

  Ratty black hair, with its snarls only half tamed by a fraying ponytail. Pale skin, sunless and unhealthy. Her jaw line sported a faded bruise she couldn’t recall earning, and her ragged clothes were smeared with oil and general deck-dirt, the rough fabric dyed the blue of a midnight sky back home on Terra. If her clothes had been tidier, they’d have formed a uniform: the attire of the ship’s slave caste, loose and unwashed, hanging off her slender frame.

  “Pretty as a picture,” she accused her scruffy reflection.

  “Thank you, mistress.”

  “Not you.”

  The hunched fellow seemed to muse on this for a moment. “Oh.”

  A muffled weeping in the distance stole any further comment. Human emotion, helplessness without a shred of malice. A girl. The sound carried strangely down the hallway, resonating against the metal walls.

  Octavia felt her skin prickling. She stared down the corridor, peering into the darkness that her hand-held lamp pack could only barely pierce. The beam of light lanced left and right, stabbing the gloom with weak illumination. Bare metal walls met her questing, until the light could reach no further down the long hallway.

  “Not again,” she whispered, before calling out a hesitant greeting. No answer.

  “Hello?” she tried again.

  The girl’s weeping stopped, fading away as Octavia’s voice echoed.

  “Hello, mistress.”

  “Shut up, you.”

  “Yes, mistress.”

  She swallowed, and her throat clicked softly. There were no children on the ship. Not anymore. Octavia reached for her hand vox, and almost thumbed the Send rune. But what was the point? Septimus wasn’t on the ship. He’d been gone for almost two months now, leaving her alone.

  Octavia clicked her fingers at her… servant? Attendant? Thing.

  He turned blind eyes up to her. How he managed to stare adoringly when his eyes were sewn shut was quite beyond her.

  “Come on,” she said.

  “Yes, mistress.”

  “You heard that, right? The girl?”

  “No, mistress.”

  She led him on, leaving her chamber far behind. As they walked, he picked at the dirty bandages wrapping his hands, but said nothing more. Occasionally, a sound from deeper in the ship would carry through the hull’s bones. The clanging of a machinist’s tools or the clank of bootsteps several decks up. Occasionally, she heard muttered voices, sibilant in their murderer’s tongue. She was struggling to learn even the basics of Nostraman since her capture. To listen to it, it sounded both seductive and mellifluous. To learn it was another matter. At its core, Nostraman was a nightmare of complex words and jumbled phrasing, scarcely related to Gothic at all. She suspected that despite Septimus’ pleasant praise, she was mispronouncing everything, and she was fairly certain the vocabulary she’d mastered so far wasn’t something even a particularly dim infant would be proud of.

  They moved on through the gloom, nearing the passageway’s end. In the darkness ahead, where the corridor branched into a junction, a figure dashed from one hallway to the next. It ran right across her path—too slight and small to be an adult, too tiny to be even a ruined thing like her attendant. A blur of blue clothing met her stare before the figure was gone. Octavia listened to its gentle, rapid footfalls running down the other corridor.

  Again, she heard the childish weeping—the soft mewling of a child trying to keep her pain hidden.

  “Hello?”

  “Ashilla sorsollun, ashilla uthullun,” the little girl called back to her, as the sound of fleeing footsteps faded.

  “I think I’m going back to my chamber,” Octavia said softly.

  II

  GANGES STATION

  A sliver of midnight drifted on dead engines, betraying nothing of its presence.

  A world turned in the emptiness, its cloudless face one of grey stone and lifeless continents. Even an untrained eye needed o
nly to glance at the rock to see its potential, not to nurture life, but to feed an industrious species with its precious ore.

  The only evidence of human existence hung in orbit: a vast platform of gunmetal grey, its empty docking arms reaching into the void. Along the station’s hull, stencilled in Imperial Gothic lettering, was the word GANGES.

  The sliver of darkness drifted ever closer, as blind to astral scanners as it was to the naked eye. Within its blade-like body, a machine began to shriek.

  Maruc crashed down onto the couch, wanting nothing more than to stop moving. For a few moments, that was more than enough. He couldn’t even be bothered to kick his boots off. Sixteen-hour shifts weren’t the worst of his compulsory labour duties, but they were damn close. He drew in a breath that hurt his ribs, getting a lungful of his habitation pod’s stuffy air. He smelled food cartons that needed throwing out days ago, and the ever-present suggestion of unwashed socks.

  Home sweet home.

  By the time the sigh finished leaving his lips, he was already thumbing at his closed eyes, trying to massage away some of the sting from staring at clanking conveyor belts all day. The earache, he couldn’t do anything about. That had to stay.

  With an exaggerated groan, he rolled to reach for the remote control palette where it lay in pieces on the floor. A few clicks later and he’d reattached the battery pack. He repeatedly speared the loose ON button with his fingertip, knowing it’d pick up on his intent at some point. For a wonder, it only took a few seconds this time. The screen mounted on the opposite wall flickered to life.

  Well. Sort of.

  It showed the kind of jagged distortion that spoke of something much worse than a mistuning. A technical fault, maybe. No picture, no sound, no nothing. Not that Ganges’ endless cycle of Ecclesiarchal sermons, obituaries and technical safety broadcasts were exciting, but they beat seeing nothing but static.