03 - Savage Scars Read online

  And then, the strike cruiser Fist of Light came into view. Though smaller than the Blade of Woe, the Space Marine vessel, which belonged to the Iron Hands contingent of the crusade forces, radiated menace as if the cold outer steel skin shielded a raging furnace at its heart. Where the Imperial Navy warships were stately, with sharp prows and covered in Gothic detailing, the Space Marine vessels were blunt-prowed and unadorned. Their flanks were not encrusted with devotional statues, but sheathed in the thickest ceramite armour known to man. The Fist of Light was the largest Space Marine warship in the crusade fleet, the remainder frigates and destroyers. Her armoured flanks were painted black, white and steel grey, the predominant colours of the Iron Hands heraldry, and they were pitted with countless thousands of small craters, each a battle scar earned over many centuries of service to the Imperium of Mankind.

  The fleet crossed the point at which its longest-ranged weapons could open fire upon the alien defence stations. Initially, these weapons were those mounted in dorsal turrets, or torpedoes fired from cavernous tubes mounted in the armoured prows. The Blade of Woe’s weapons batteries spoke first, for they had the longest range, great salvoes of city-levelling ordnance blasting across the void to smash into the tau stations. Yet, the display was inconsequential compared to what would follow when the ships’ masters ordered their warships to turn and present a broadside to the alien platforms. The Imperial Navy’s battle doctrine dictated that its vessels’ firepower was concentrated in mighty batteries on either flank. A single salvo could drive off, cripple or even destroy almost any enemy vessel, as the tau had already discovered to their detriment.

  The Nomad’s systems began to reawaken, the lectern screen flickering to life, though it remained shot through with churning, grainy static. Though too far distant to be seen with the naked eye, even that of a Space Marine, the screen indicated the presence of a number of the crusade fleet’s supporting vessels. Tenders stood by should a warship need repair or towing clear of the battle. Tankers and mass haulers carried vast quantities of fuel and other commodities. Transports carried the crusade’s ground troops, each of them home to an entire regiment of Imperial Guard. Most of the ground troops belonged to one of the Brimlock regiments, raised from the planet on which the crusade against the expanding alien empire of the tau had first been preached. Right on the edge of the readout was an icon representing the huge conveyance Toil of Digamma, a vessel of the Adeptus Mechanicus that transported the Legio Thanataris Titan Legion, known as the “Deathbringers”. The towering god-machines carried in its cavernous bays would be crucial in the forthcoming planetary assault.

  As mighty as the crusade fleet was, Sarik was painfully aware that it lacked sufficient carrier capacity. Scant few interceptors were available to defend the larger warships against enemy fighter-bombers. These would be able to inflict a terrible blow were they to get amongst the lumbering transports that followed behind the main fleet.

  Conversi Loccum spoke up. “Signal from fleet, brother-sergeant. The platforms burn. It is done.”

  Looking around him at his smoke-wreathed bridge, sparks still spitting from wrecked consoles, Sarik shook his head. “It is far from done.”

  “Addendum to signal,” the crewman said.

  “Go on,” Sarik replied, a sense of foreboding rising inside him.

  “All crusade council members are to gather aboard the Blade of Woe, brother-sergeant. Immediately.”

  “Reason?” Sarik said.

  “None given, brother-sergeant, but the signal has the highest priority level.”

  “Better request Blade sends a cutter then,” Sarik sighed. “We’re going nowhere fast in this state.”

  “Aye, sir,” the conversi replied, opening a channel to the Blade of Woe to arrange for a naval runabout to collect Veteran Sergeant Sarik, and ferry him to the hastily gathered council of the Damocles Gulf Crusade.

  Sarik was the last to arrive at the majestic Blade of Woe, and he noted straight away that the atmosphere aboard the flagship was unusually strained. Ordinarily, following a victory such as that the crusade had just won, the mood would be celebratory, but right now it was tense. The feeling had only increased as Sarik had made his way from the main docking bay to the council chamber. Now that he stood at the ornate chamber doors, he had a feeling he was about to find out why.

  The portal ground heavily aside, and the voice of the council’s convenor announced, “Veteran Sergeant Sarik, of the Adeptus Astartes White Scars.” The convenor’s iron shod staff of office slammed into the deck at his feet, indicating formally that Sarik was recognised and welcomed.

  The sergeant stepped through the portal, into the council chamber.

  Though a large space, the chamber was lit in such a way that little more than its huge, circular table was visible, illuminated by several dozen floating servo-skulls, the crown of each surmounted with a flickering candle, runnels of solidified wax covering their surfaces. The wan candlelight overlapped where the servo-skulls converged, illuminating the table below, while others picked out the councillors seated around it. Sarik saw immediately that four of the seats were unoccupied. One seat was his, and the remaining three had belonged to councillors lost in the crusade’s previous engagements.

  Apart from the table, the only other thing visible was a large pict-slate mounted on one wall. The slate’s surface showed the image of the three enemy defence stations breaking up or burning to death under the fleet’s withering bombardment. The scene had been slowed down and was being played in loop, as if the suffering of each was being repeated over and over again, so as to reiterate the Imperium’s glory. In truth, the stations had proved not nearly so well armed and armoured as previous ones the crusade had encountered, a fact for which its leaders should be grateful.

  As Sarik crossed to his seat, one of the councillors stood, a dozen candle-bearing servo-skulls converging on him from above. The position of chairman of the council rotated with each sitting, and for this convocation, Logistician-General Stempf of the Adeptus Terra fulfilled the role.

  “The brother-sergeant has arrived,” Stempf announced, the tau defence stations reliving their death throes behind him. “And so we can begin.”

  As Sarik seated himself, he cast a glance to the man to his left. Lucian Gerrit, the rogue trader, met his eye and shrugged. Gerrit was in many ways the archetypal rogue trader, a privateer and something of a scoundrel, though Sarik found him far less vainglorious than most men of his class. Like Sarik, Lucian lived his life according to a strictly defined sense of honour, which, also like Sarik, was at times at odds with the machinations of the galaxy and of the fates. Lucian was a large man, his head shaved except for the extravagant topknot sprouting from his crown, a style not unlike that worn by Sarik and his Chogoran brothers. He wore a dress coat resembling that of the high-ranking officers of the Imperial Navy, but festooned with more gold braid than even the most decorated of admirals would dare display. Sarik had learned to see past the affectation, knowing it was part of the role that the rogue trader played and that, if anything, it was a ruse designed to hide the man’s true self and confound the weak and the stupid.

  Sarik looked back at Stempf, a man he had grown to strongly dislike over the previous months. The Logistician-General cultivated what he hoped was an ascetic air. Yet Sarik, gifted with the superhuman senses of the Adeptus Astartes, could not help but detect the cloying reek of illicit narcotics that permeated his adept’s robes.

  In common with the bulk of the crusade’s Space Marine contingent, Sarik preferred to remain aloof from men like Stempf and from the incessant politicking that bedevilled its command council. The leaders had become increasingly factionalised, splitting into two opposed power blocs. No doubt the situation would get worse before it was resolved.

  “Gentlemen,” Stempf continued, warming to his role as chairman of the crusade council. “We have this hour received an astropathic communiqu� of such import that I have convened this session of the council.” The other
councillors exchanged glances. Stempf had not shared the details of the communication with any others, even with the leaders of the bloc to which he was aligned, the firebrand Cardinal Esau Gurney and the dark person of Inquisitor Grand.

  The Logistician-General nodded to the council’s convenor, who struck his staff of office against the decking again, the metallic thud resounding around the chamber. From the still open portal, a hunched, robed figure emerged, and made his way to stand beside Stempf.

  “Master Karzello,” Stempf said as he stepped to one side, allowing the man to stand before the council.

  Master Karzello was the crusade’s senior astropath, the head of the choir whose psychic mind-voice allowed them to communicate across the interstellar voids with the distant Imperium of Man. Such distances made communications by conventional means impossible, but the most powerful of astropaths could receive and send messages across many hundreds of light-years of space. The seething aetheric energies and unknowable stellar phenomena that afflicted the region made even this means of communication unreliable at best, and next to impossible at worst. Nonetheless, Master Karzello was one of the most skilled astropaths in the entire segmentum, so his appearance before the council was greatly portentous.

  A dozen candle-bearing servo-skulls swung away from the Logistician-General, to cluster around the master astropath, throwing his wizened features into flickering relief. The man was ancient, kept alive long past his natural span of years by repeated applications of the rejuvenat treatment available only to the most senior and valued of the Imperium’s servants. The treatment was slowly poisoning the master astropath, even if it was keeping him alive. He was so thin that his skin looked like a paper-thin layer of crumbling parchment, barely covering his bones. He had no eyes, for as an astropath his sensory organs had been blasted away by the process that had created him. His body was only kept upright by an arrangement of clanking brass callipers and leather braces that bore his frame and animated his limbs. Furthermore, his robes, though crafted of the finest deep-green void-silk, were encrusted with filth, filling the council chamber with the acrid reek of bodily fluids.

  When Master Karzello spoke his physical voice was no more than a whisper. His words were heard not by the ear but by the mind, for despite his bodily frailty, the astropath was gifted with one of the most powerful minds in the region.

  “Honoured counsellors,” Karzello began, his psychic voice resounding with such vitality that it drowned out his real one. “I bear a message. A message from the Inquisition.”

  All eyes turned towards the black-robed and hooded Inquisitor Grand. Sarik’s gorge rose as he considered what machinations the agent might have conspired in order to gain total power over the Damocles Gulf Crusade. At Pra’yen, Grand had used his rank to overrule the fleet’s command structure, but in so doing had made himself more enemies than allies. Was this communiqu� a means of cementing his power and taking total control of the crusade?

  “Under what cipher?” the cold voice of Inquisitor Grand interjected. Sarik exchanged a second glance with the rogue trader by his side, for here was a mystery unfolding before them both.

  The ancient astropath turned his skull-like face towards Grand, and replied, “That of Lord Kryptman.”

  All in the council chamber knew the name of Lord Inquisitor Kryptman, the scourge of xenos the length of the Eastern Fringe. The rogue trader at Sarik’s side nodded subtly across the table, and Sarik followed the gesture, seeing that Grand and his arch-ally Gurney were engaged in hushed conversation.

  “Please, Master Karzello,” Stempf pressed. “Continue.”

  The astropath’s head turned back towards the table centre, the motion accompanied by the whining of dozens of tiny motors. “Lord Inquisitor Kryptman states that his most trusted emissary shall soon be joining the crusade.”

  Grand looked up sharply at this, though his face was unreadable beneath the black hood of his voluminous robes. It seemed to Sarik that the candle-bearing servo-skulls were giving the inquisitor a wide berth. He could hardly blame them.

  “This emissary carries the seal, and her words are to be obeyed as those of Lord Kryptman himself. That is all.”

  As Stempf stood and the master astropath shuffled out of the chamber, every counsellor began to speak as one. Taking advantage of the din, Sarik leaned towards his neighbour and asked, “What do you make of this?”

  “Ordinarily, I’d say the involvement of another inquisitor would seal Grand and Gurney’s control of the crusade for good…”

  “But?” Sarik pressed, frustrated with the need to involve himself in the crusade’s politics, but knowing he might have to.

  “But I’m not so sure. We both know Grand could just wave his Inquisitorial rosette at the council, dismiss us all and take personal control of the whole crusade.”

  “Yet, he has not done so,” Sarik replied. The dealings of the Inquisition were even more obscure than the council’s, and Sarik had even less desire to become embroiled in them.

  “Indeed,” Lucian said thoughtfully, his expression shifting before he changed the subject. “How go the preparations for the drop?”

  “General Gauge has decided to take advantage of the aliens’ delay in reinforcing their world,” replied Sarik, relieved to talk of something other than politics. “We move within hours.” Sarik grinned. “I for one look forward to the feel of solid ground beneath my feet, and a weapon held in my own hands once more.”

  “The enemy fleet is moving in, my lady.”

  Brielle Gerrit, daughter of the rogue trader Lucian, stood high up on a tiered gallery, looking down on the busy, brightly-lit tau command centre. The chamber could not have been more different than the equivalent on an Imperial vessel. The lighting was bright and the air clean, the stark white, curved structures pristine and devoid of the tracery and script applied to every surface of most Imperial vessels. Alien tau attended to their stations with calm efficiency, and not one of them was hard-wired into his terminal. Instead, the operators’ hands worked effortlessly across banks of glowing readouts, utilising machine-intelligent interfaces considered heretical across the Imperium.

  Like her father, Brielle wore the distinctive garb of her class, a flowing dress coat of the finest deep blue fabric lined with elaborate gold piping. Brielle wore her hair in a mass of flowing plaits, the natural black tipped with purple and violet streaks lending her an outlandish appearance entirely at odds with her surroundings. Her eyes were dark and brooding, and lined with painted swirls that further emphasised her exotic features.

  Brielle’s grip on the railing tightened and her knuckles turned white, but she made no response to the man who stood beside her. Naal, Brielle’s companion, wore the dark grey, hooded robes of an Imperial scribe, but that was far from what he truly was. His face bore a tattoo of an Imperial aquila, bearing witness to a former life he had long ago abandoned in favour of service to the tau empire.

  Brielle continued to stare fixedly at a vast holographic display below, her mind swimming with doubt as she desperately sought a way out of her predicament.

  “My lady?” Naal repeated.

  “Thank you, Naal,” Brielle said finally, not taking her eyes off the vast display that filled the centre of the command deck.

  “The tau wish to remind us that we have a task to perform. The envoy will be with us shortly. He expects your full report on the crusade fleet’s strength.”

  I’ll give him his report, Brielle seethed inwardly. I’ll find a way out of this mess yet…

  “Brielle,” Naal pressed, his tone low and conspiratorial. “Brielle, you joined the tau willingly, and they offer you much in return. But there is a price, as well you knew.”

  Brielle rounded on the man who was at once her co-conspirator, her lover and her jailor. “They offer much,” she hissed. “But how much of it is of any worth, tell me that?”

  Naal glanced furtively about the command centre, before leaning in to speak. The whole space was brightly-lit and spaci
ous, and there was nowhere for the pair to hide from suspicious eyes. “The tau have made you their envoy to the entire Eastern Fringe, Brielle. Who amongst your line holds such power, aside from your father?”

  Brielle resented the mention of her father, who she had no doubt believed her dead before the Damocles Gulf Crusade had even commenced its assault into tau space. “I’m a rogue trader, Naal,” she said. “Such power is hardly a novelty to me.”

  “I understand that, my lady,” Naal said. “But you joined the tau at least in part to recover what status you lost when your stepbrother was named your father’s successor. Remaining in the clan was a dead end, or so you yourself believed when you agreed to join the tau and forge your own destiny.”

  That much was true. Brielle had indeed seen something of value in the tau’s collectivist philosophy, something which she could be a part of after her family had rejected her. But she had recently come to realise that she had acted foolishly, and in haste. In truth, she had allowed herself to be seduced by the aliens’ words and ideals, seeing something in their notions of the “Greater Good” that she could be a part of. Later, as the scales had slowly lifted from her eyes, she had seen that she had merely sought to escape the cruel twist of fate that placed her forever in the shadow of her stepbrother and robbed her of her rightful inheritance as bearer of the Warrant of Trade of the Arcadius Clan of rogue traders. Then she had sought to turn the situation to her advantage, her rogue trader’s instincts asserting themselves once more. But it was now clear to Brielle that there was no profit to be made in working with or for the tau, no matter the plaudits they heaped upon her. She desired only to escape them, and already, a plan was forming in her mind…