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.