[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Read online

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  SHADOW POINT

  Battlefleet Gothic - 02

  Gordon Rennie

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  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

  The burning god sat immobile upon his smouldering throne, feeling the pulse and flow of the life energy of the place ebb through him. He had sat there for an eternity as mere mortal beings reckon such things, dreaming dreams of battles past and battles still to come, and thinking thoughts which not even the longest-lived of his race’s savants could ever truly fathom.

  There were others of his kind out there in the universe beyond, other fractured splinters of the same original being, dreaming their own dreams and feeling the life-flow of their own home-worlds pulse through them. So few of them left, the burning god lamented. Once there had been worlds upon worlds of them, and in his dreams he could still see them as they once were. He saw a race at the height of its glory, revelling in its own power and majesty, capable of reforming entire worlds to suit its own purpose, able to reach out to probe the deepest mysteries of time and space. All gone now, it lamented. Now there were only these few poor remnants left, seeds drifting in the gulfs of space, a scattered diaspora struggling to hold back the tide of darkness which would one day still rise to engulf all that had once been.

  But not yet, the warrior god knew. Not yet. Not while it and those like it still existed to protect all that remained of their race and hold back the darkness for just a little longer.

  Slowly, though, in a period reckoned over decades, the warrior god had been stirring in its sleep. There was war being waged amongst the stars, it knew. There was always war—the lesser, younger races seemed to be have born both for and from war—but it knew that, somehow, this war was different. It heard the distant wraithbone voices singing of war between the mon-keigh corpse-worshippers and the human servants of the Great Abomination, and the songs interrupted its dreams in a way in which they never had before.

  The burning god looked into its dreams of the future for answers, and saw that, for the first time in millennia, it would soon be called upon again. Its dreams were troubled. It saw a convergence of many intersecting fate-lines ahead of it, and, after that, its dream-images of the future were too vague and indistinct to be properly discerned. Something lay just over the horizon of its perception, a shadow point where many possible futures lay in wait, which not even its near omniscient dream-vision could bring properly into focus.

  For the first time in long, long millennia, the burning god knew something approximating fear, and its fear communicated itself through ancient wraithbone pathways to the living mind of its drifting homeworld. The wraithbone amplified the dreaming god’s concerns and communicated them to the other drifting islands out in the darkness, the faint but growing alarm call spreading through the far-flung diaspora like ripples across the surface of a pond.

  Slowly but surely, the first stirrings of a call to arms began amongst the closest neighbouring islands, and the burning god’s dreams of bloody and fiery carnage to come began to seep into the minds of its warrior acolytes.

  Within the god itself, the ancient furnace of its heart began to beat with greater strength as it pumped torrid streams of living fire though the god’s immobile limbs, shaking off the languor of too many millennia of inactivity. The burning god was beginning to stir to life, and, when fully awakened, its wrath would be terrible to behold.

  PART ONE

  CONSPIRACIES

  ONE

  They had been torturing the warp spawn creature for six days now. Endless torture without relief or remission, using methods known only to the Inquisition’s finest interrogator-adepts. For six days now, they had been working in shifts to visit miseries and abominations on living flesh that could not easily be imagined by most ordinary subjects of the Imperium; and, no matter what they did, no matter what manner of gruesome cruelties they inflicted, they had so far been neither able to kill it nor to induce it to give up whatever warp-born secrets it had to tell.

  It was contained within a null-field in an adamantium-walled chamber buried three hundred metres below the surface. There was no way that the sound of its screams and babbling, blasphemous shrieks could even be heard outside the examination cell, and yet, somehow, some aspect of its agonies seemed to transmit themselves up through the layers of armourplas and adamantium shielding which entombed this deepest and most secret sub-level of the Inquisition fortress. Its screams echoed silently in the minds of everyone within the place, penetrating through whatever psychic wards and screens existed to protect the citadel and its occupants from daemonic intrusion. Only a precious, oath-sworn few even knew of the thing’s existence, and, yet, somehow all sensed its presence. There had been a wave of suicides and murderous fights amongst the prisoners held in the ordinary detention levels above, Horst knew, no doubt prompted by the invisible currents of psychic horror emanating up from the thing imprisoned down here. Even the hand-picked and veteran members of the senior inquisitor’s retinue seemed shaken and unnerved by such close proximity to the entity.

  Remarkably, however, the creature’s presence amongst them had had a most unexpected effect on the soul of at least one unwilling guest of the Inquisition. Two days ago, guards had come running in answer to the cacophony of screams and babbling pleas coming from the cell of Gorgio Nepheris, the so-called “bodygatherer fiend of Bergamo”, and captive of the Ordo Hereticus.

  For two months now, the renegade surgeon had held his silence, revelling in his own planet-wide infamy and answering with a mocking smile his interrogators’ demands to recan
t his sins and reveal the whereabouts of the remains of his many missing victims.

  Now, however, the terror of the back-alleys of Bergamo, the third largest city here on the Gothic sector world of Lethe, had brushed minds with the thing held in the crypts below and had understood something of what true evil really was. He was currently to be found in a confession chamber, begging forgiveness from a stern-faced Ecclesiarchy confessor as he kept a small team of scribes busy with a nonstop, babbling litany of the details of his multitude of crimes.

  The size of this list, and the enormous and previously unsuspected numbers of his victims over the course of his century-long murder spree amongst the poor and destitute of Bergamo had stunned even his interrogators.

  Horst had little doubt that this catalogue of atrocity, when finally completed and codified, would be enough to allow the local Arbites force to clear out several record rooms of files on hitherto unsolved cases, and hopefully bring some kind of comfort into the minds of the families of Gorgio’s many victims, a figure which had so far stood at some twelve thousand dead, though the number was reckoned to possibly double by the time the repenting heretic had completed his confession.

  It was a pitifully small solace, Horst knew. The confession and, eventually, the execution of one lone heresy-ridden maniac. Significant only in local or perhaps even planetary terms, but completely infinitesimal in scale compared to the tumultuous events happening throughout the Gothic sector. This was why he was here on this world when so many possibly greater and more urgent matters called for his attention elsewhere within this war-torn sector of Imperial space. This was part of the mission he had embarked upon when the High Masters of the Inquisition had first despatched him to the Gothic sector eleven years ago, when they had first suspected the stirring to life of forces within the Eye of Terror, when they had dimly perceived the first awful warp-whispers of the Despoiler’s intent to unleash a new and deadly Black Crusade upon the worlds of the Imperium of Mankind.

  As he exited the elevator and walked down the corridor towards the single adamantium-reinforced and rune-inscribed door at the end of the passage, Horst recalled other passages from that mission, and other stages on the journey which had led to this moment.

  Purgatory, nine years ago. Smoke, ugly and black, filled the skies above the world, casting a gloomy shroud over the devastation below. Horst had seen such scenes before, on a score of worlds across the Gothic sector, but with a growing feeling of dread, he already knew that this one was different from and far more ominous than the other Chaos raids that had plagued the sector in recent years.

  With a feeling of apprehensive dread that grew stronger with every step he took, he climbed up the jagged and fused sides of the still-smoking giant impact crater where the other members of the Inquisition survey team were already gathered. There was a small fleet of Imperial battle and rescue craft in orbit above the world, all from various arms of Imperial service, but the inspection of this devastated area of the planet’s surface had been claimed by the Inquisition alone, and Horst had imposed a five hundred kilometre exclusion zone around the site. What lay here—or at least the evidence of what perhaps had lain here, Horst reminded himself, feeling that sense of dread grow ever tighter within him—was for the eyes of the Emperor’s most trusted servants only.

  Standing with the others, he stared into the deep, still-smouldering wound which had been gouged into the earth. A glance at the map display on his data-slate confirmed the almost unbelievable. According to the information, this twelve kilometre-wide gaping abyss of burning gases and smouldering, still semi-molten rock had, until just a few short days ago, been the location of a heavily-defended Imperium planetary base, home to thousands of Imperial Guard troopers, Adeptus Mechanicus adepts and servants of the myriad of other branches of Imperial government.

  All across the planet’s surface, other settlements and Imperial outposts had been struck and obliterated during the lightning-fast raid, but this, Horst knew, was the main object and target of the attack. Here the fell touch of Abaddon the Despoiler could truly be seen on the surface of Purgatory, scarring the face of the planet forever.

  Horst looked down, and, through the haze of burning, sulphurous gases, saw the marks on the sheer sides of the crater, where, from high above in space, an orbiting warship had directed a coruscating beam of lance energy down onto the planet’s surface, blasting away the topsoil and all of the fortress built upon that topsoil, and probing deep into the underlying bedrock of the planet.

  How many lance-armed warships would it take to accomplish such a task, the inquisitor asked himself? He both marvelled and feared the thought of the massive outpouring of firepower that must have been required to carve such a wound through the planet’s dense, rocky crust. And then a second, more troubling, thought suddenly struck him. What if it wasn’t a fleet of warships? What if all this were the work of something else, some terrible new addition to the Despoiler’s armoury which they had yet to encounter?

  He shook his head, trying to dispel his gloomy mood. The potential ramifications of all that had happened here were bad enough, without adding to them with increasingly troublesome thoughts about some fictitious, planet-blasting super-weapon now possibly in the hands of the Imperium of Mankind’s most hated and implacable enemy.

  He looked again into the depths of the crater, rechecking the stream of info-runes now scrolling across the face of his data-slate. Despite the enormous energy stream that had been unleashed on the surface here, it was plain to see that it had somehow been expertly contained and targeted to an almost uncanny degree of precision. The overlaying surface material had been simply blasted away, yes, but, after that, the energy stream had been tightly focussed as it drilled down into the planet’s crust, obliterating dense rock and mineral deposits in micro-seconds as it pushed deeper down into the planet’s core, almost as if it were probing in search of something.

  But probing in search of what, Horst wondered, already sickly suspecting the answer to his own unspoken question.

  “Drones and servo-skull scouts have been despatched into the fissure. We estimate it to be at least eighteen thousand metres deep,” reported Monomachus, taking up his customary position alongside his inquisitor master, “so it may take them some time to make a full survey. Residual energy from the massive weapon discharge which created the fissure, along with local interference from some of the mineral and ore deposits in the surrounding bedrock, may also affect surveyor readings and delay a fully accurate understanding of what is, or may once have been, down there.”

  “But?” queried Horst, silently fulminating against the habit apparently ingrained in all of the Machine God’s servants of taking seemingly forever to get to the point.

  Monomachus tapped rune-keys on the brass facade of his antique data-slate, pausing also to silently commune with the interconnected machine-minds of his brother tech-priests and their mechanical server-devices, not only here on the planet’s surface but also those aboard the Inquisition lightship in orbit overhead.

  “But already we are detecting strong traces of psychometric radiation of a probable xeno-origin emanating upwards from the fissure bottom. The traces are strong, but are already starting to decay.”

  “Hypothesis,” demanded Horst, knowing that the tech-priests were slaves to statistics, facts, figures, and long-established analytical models, and hated any kind of open, unsupported conjecture. It was Monomachus’s ability to break free of such dogmatic behaviour and make intuitive leaps of informed opinion which made him such a valued member of the inquisitor’s entourage.

  “As I said, it may be some time before a fully accurate survey can be made, lord inquisitor, but it is my considered opinion that the spot we are now standing upon was indeed, until very recently, the hidden resting place of the xeno-artefact known as the Hand of Darkness.”

  Horst’s booted feet noisily crunched over the brittle, ossified material that carpeted the ground for hundreds of kilometres in all directions, the no
ise sounding like the sharp crack of las-fire in the still, silent air of Ornsworld. Reluctantly, he looked down at the bone-chaff beneath his feet, picking out the details of tiny human-like bones over which he walked. They might easily have been mistaken for the remains of children, but Horst knew otherwise.

  He lifted his gaze and looked around him, seeing the endless bone-litter, the piles of skull cairns dotted all across the horizon and the smoke plumes from the cremation pits which still rose up into the skies now over a week since the last of Abaddon’s extermination legions had left this world.

  He heard the crunch of more booted feet behind him, and turned to see the figure of Monomachus behind him, the tech-priest distastefully gathering up his gold-silicate robes in an effort to keep the long hems clear of the corpse-material littering the ground.

  “How many?” asked Horst.

  There was a characteristic pause of several seconds before Monomachus answered. In that time, the inquisitor heard the faint whirring of the cogitator machinery within his Adeptus Mechanicus advisor’s rebuilt metal cranium. Other than that, the only sound to be heard in this tainted place was the whistling insect drone of servo-skulls as they drifted lazily over the scene, recording all evidence of the atrocity for the Inquisition’s closed library archives, although some of the footage, suitably edited for mass consumption, would no doubt turn up in Imperial propaganda vidpict-casts.

  “Three or four million, at this site alone,” intoned Monomachus, his typically blank-toned delivery giving scant homage to the enormity of the scale of the atrocity contained in that number. “Preliminary orbital-drone scans show another twelve sites across the planet’s surface of at least a similar magnitude, as well as possibly up to sixty other lesser massacre sites.”

  Horst’s only reply was a weary grunt. He personally had little fondness for the stunted abhuman breed known as ratlings, but they were part of the Imperium of Mankind and part of the Emperor’s divine plan, and he regretted the deaths of so many of them, as he would that of any of the Emperor’s loyal servants.