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.