They fanned out from the drop zone, murky giants with boltguns raised and aimed.
Veteran-Brother Donbuss was triple-checking the belt feed to his heavy bolter and covering the advance from relative high ground. Antille dropped to one knee, hand to where his ear was underneath his helmet, the long antennae of a shoulder-mounted vox-booster whipping above him. Each Space Marine’s battleplate was independently vox-capable, but the volume of near-orbit communications noise and the signal diffraction of their own fleet’s place in hiding necessitated the booster should they need to raise their brothers around the eighth planet. Apothecary Reoch stood nearby holding his narthecium at arm’s length, sampling the wind for toxin traces or pathogens. It was almost impossible to kill a Space Marine by such means, but a reasonable excess of caution won more wars than abandon ever had. Veteran-Brother Karva was the twelfth and last down, pivoting on the spot as a promethium tank dropped through the darkness and catching it in the crook of his arms.
Zerberyn voxed up to the Thunderhawk that his squad was deployed, received two brittle clicks through his microbead in response, and then felt a slam of downwash.
With a tremendous roar of thrust, the gunship rose, re-angling its engines for horizontal flight, and pulled away. The dust storm began to settle, stones and larger debris falling to leave dried organic matter zipping about. It cleared the air enough for Zerberyn to see Penitence turning for a fly-past of the planet’s principal city, Princus Praxa, and its Crusade fortress approximately two hundred kilometres east across the daylight meridian.
A second gunship circled in low. Its metallic bodywork was embellished with unorthodox modifications: battle honours, ablative hull plating and variant weapon loadouts — not all of it was of obvious human make. The star-backed iron skull of the Iron Warriors stared grimly from its tailfin and nose section. Keeping low, it banked left and began to steadily climb, mapping the terrain with a pair of sweeping spotlights and searching for an appropriate drop-zone of its own.
Zerberyn processed his surroundings without thinking about it.
Left, a diagonal line of wind power converters, bi-blades, chomping sombrely through the dark. A greasy metal water tank, empty, riddled with holes, fenced off with wire that had been cut and trampled. Brother Tarsus advanced, boltgun sweeping the row of quietly whumping turbines.
Right, looming rockcrete-walled slurry pits, surrounded by dirty metal outbuildings. A petrochem generator. A silage tank, round-walled and massive. One of the sheds was a machine store. It was open, an upswinging outer door half-covering a weather-beaten wheeled truck. The vehicle was a rusted contraption of belts, pulleys, and funnels, with an articulated pallet lifter at the front end painted to look like an orkish mouth. It had a canvas top and a blood-splattered rear fender. Its tyres were flat. Brothers Galen and Borhune took firing positions, Karva moving up to cover the units with his heavy flamer. Behind, nothing, according to the Thunderhawk’s deep augur scans — just over-exploited pastureland and dust.
Ahead, the objective.
His enhanced low-light vision described the structure in sharp detail. It was a massive, industrialised agricultural unit, with dust-tanned steel walls and barred windows. A large, rectangular glyph of a twisting serpent had been graffitied over the upper storey windows. It was an ork structure, but it was only as Zerberyn closed and metrics gathered in his helm display that he realised that every feature was about twenty-five per cent too large for human standard. The dirt drive leading up to the main door was churned with tyre tracks and strewn with bone meal, dung and what looked like scraps of clothing.
He loped forwards at an easy run. Brothers Hardran and Nalis followed up behind, flanking and covering the upper storeys and secondary entrances with their bolters. Tosque and Columba kept pace, the former maintaining his aim on the door with a bulky combi-plasma.
The unit frequency crackled in Zerberyn’s ear.
‘Galen. No contacts.’
‘Tarsus. Same here, brother-captain.’
‘Reoch,’ voxed the Apothecary, voice double-distorted and animal. ‘I am reading high soil concentrations of antibiotics and human growth hormones. I cannot say why, but I see no danger.’
‘Vigilance, brothers,’ Zerberyn replied, unslinging his thunder hammer.
His predecessor had favoured the purist elegance of the power sword, but long before the moment he had been granted his pick of the Chapter armoury Zerberyn had known what he would select. The weapon was dormant in his grip, quiet, and would remain so until the moment of impact. And when that moment came, whatever it was on the end of it, Zerberyn meant for it to die. Such was the thunder hammer’s pragmatic beauty.
Up close, the main door looked solid. Heavy plastek, proofed with an oily black sealant coating, hinged outwards and reinforced with armaplas crossbars. For an unmodified trooper, forcing access would have proven a complicated and time-consuming matter.
But not for him.
He dropped his pauldron plate and crashed his leading shoulder through without breaking stride. Shrugging off splinters, he straightened and scanned the room.
It was dark, cut off from the light of the stars and the ships massed in orbit, too dark even for the light-scavenging cells of his occulobe. His helm light beamed across riveted walls, ventilation grilles, moving onto a staircase against the left-side wall. The beam tracked it up to a mezzanine level, shadows of the square-sided balusters stretching out towards the rear wall and then angling sharply back across it as the beam moved on.
Hardran, Nalis and Borhune spread out, their own helmet beams dispersing through the cavernous space.
Zerberyn could hear murmuring, weeping, the strained sound of many, many bodies breathing. He sniffed. Even through his battleplate’s rebreather apparatus he was getting the smell of something rancid.
His helm display busied his vision with floating markers. The position, facing, and condition of his squad showed as glowing gold numerals. Box reticules closed over objects of interest — an atmosphere conditioner, a swaying chain connected to some kind of overhead wash unit — furnishing them with a full tactical overlay of range, angles and threat recognition. Reticules floated against the dark, open, uncertain, as his helm light swept over a chain link enclosure.
Eyes glittered dully in the beam.
‘What is it, brother?’
Tarsus. Zerberyn barely registered the vox-scratch in his ear. He grunted in disgust.
‘Animals.’
Fourteen
The man looked up into the glare of Zerberyn’s helmet beam with distant eyes. His pupils constricted to pinpricks and he recoiled from the light with a grunt, but did not otherwise appear to notice the giant in front of him. He was bruised, shorn, naked, but unusually fat. This was not the maltreatment Zerberyn would have expected from an alien conquerer. There was no brutality here. Injuries aside, which looked to be postural from remaining in one position for too long, rather than inflicted, the man looked as well-fed as any planetary governor.
Zerberyn moved his light on: blank faces luminesced under the beam, then returned to darkness and indignity as it passed. There must have been close to a hundred hemmed into the stall. There was no room for them to move, even to sit. The floor was perforated metal, for drainage, but the sheer volume of waste had clogged the pores and solid effluent heaped up in lumpen mounds over toes that were turning black with poor circulation and disease. The stink was infernal. Despite everything that he was, Zerberyn felt himself back away. Slavery and squalor he had encountered on many worlds. This was something other. Something worse.