A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL SPACE MARINE Ian Watson 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 Emperors 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. CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CHAPTER NINETEEN CHAPTER TWENTY PART ONE THREE BROTHERS OF TRAZIOR CHAPTER ONE ON NECROMUNDA, SO it is said, you grow up at an early age. Or else you die early. In the hive cities which stud that deathly world as warts crust the face of a plague corpse, to join a gang is a swift route to maturity – though equally this offers no guarantee of survival. Warts, do we say? Are those hive cities mere pimples? Indeed they are – from the perspective of a food barge approaching that orb from deep space; or from the viewpoint of an incoming transport ship belonging to the Imperial Fists Space Marines, who maintain a fortress-monastery in the Palatine Hive on Necromunda… Approach closer, and those same pimples become huge termite mounds. Closer yet, and the clustered spires of each hive soar from the wastes of ash to pierce the highest clouds. Now many are almost too vast to comprehend as mere cities built by human hands. It seems as though habitable mountains have grown up precipitously and cancerously from out of the ravaged landscape in defiance of gravity the leveller. Unto its myriad inhabitants each of these hives is a separate, vertical world. Habitable, do we say? Aye, eminently so for young Lexandro d’Arquebus, who was born into the privileged higher levels of the Oberon spire of Trazior Hive. Meagrely so for his contemporary, Yeremi Valence, son of technicians domiciled on the lower hab level of Trazior. Not in the least so for Biff Tundrish, a scumnik in the polluted, lawless undercity! Already, by the untender age of fourteen, the paths of these three individuals had crossed abrasively and violently… LEXANDRO’S FATHER WAS Calculator Maximus to Lord Spinoza, whose clan owned lower hab factories that built Mammoth-class land-trains to traverse the ash wastes on great cleated tracks, stoutly armoured to resist assault by nomads. Naturally, d’Arquebus Senior never sullied his own hands – or his eyes – by descending with bodyguards from the Spinoza estate to inspect the actual processes of manufacture by tech clans. Still less did his son care a hoot for such mundane details, except insofar as techs might provide amusement for himself and fellow members of the Lordly Phantasms brat gang… Often the Phantasms – daemon-masked, each dabbed with different costly scents, and gowned in luminous silk appliquéd with lascivious emblems – would bomb around the broad upper avenues on their jet-trikes, and through almost deserted midnight malls, seeking stylised mayhem with another brat gang or hunting for an odour bar or an elegant brothel which they could take over for a few hours before fleeing just ahead of a judge patrol. Whenever the Phantasms rode the dropshafts down from their native upper levels into tech factory territory – or daringly deeper still, into the filthy honeycomb of the undercity – the impact of those brats was far from foppish. Armed with laspistols concealed under their silks, they were intent on “doing a burn” as they put it. Raphaelo Florienborque, leader of the Phantasms, joked that maybe they should take that phrase literally. In the heart of Trazior, as in every other hive on Necromunda, a vast tube of plasteel plunged all the way down through the crust of the planet. Kilometres wide, with a wall hundreds of metres thick, this conduit for the world’s inner heat fed the various power stations that were built within that wall from the factory levels upwards: heat into energy. This enormous hollow thermal spike also served as anchor and root for the hive. What a jape it would be, declared Raphaelo, to gain access to the heat-sink. What a prank to capture some upstart tech gang member, or some undercity riff-raff, and throw him into the heat-sink itself – to slide or tumble or simply fall free, down, down, tens of kilometres down into the inferno. Would their victim burn up through friction? Would he be cooked alive? Would his lungs bake, and his eyes poach, and his skin crisp to crackling before he had even fallen or slid a hundred metres? Would any remains of the wretch even reach the bubbling molten magma at the bottom? “Imagine his sensations as we launch him!” Raphaelo had drawled; and the Lordly Phantasms had giggled and flapped their obscenely embroidered, scented silks. “What a burn that would be!” they agreed. Gangs of the energy clans jealously guarded those ports which gave access to power stations and thus to the heat-sink. Down below the functioning factory levels, however, ancient levels of the hive had long been abandoned to dereliction. Only scavvy and looter gangs roamed the accumulated choking filth of that undercity – where, mostly buried under debris, but sometimes still exposed, antique ports had been welded shut millennia ago. Some of these welds had corroded, so Raphaelo had heard… Down in the stinking, toxic undercity that night, the Lordly Phantasms stalked a tech gang who were raiding in the direction of the central heat-sink. Such tech gangs held the frontier between the tangled civilisation above and the bestiality beneath. Yet this self-protective brand of public service was of no account to the Lordly Phantasms. A tech could be their target as easily as a scumnik. In a dim, foul labyrinthine catacomb braced with baroque plasteel arches bending under the weight of the hive, and choked with refuse, ambush erupted: a surprisingly well-armed scum gang attacked the techs. The scumniks, who had been lying in wait for prey used stubguns, grenades – then, at close quarters, a chainsword and knives. At first the techs had retaliated with boltguns and heavy stub weapons. Arches and debris intercepted many explosive bolts and bullets, and ammunition was soon exhausted on both sides. Pressed closer, the techs resorted to their own blades, some of chill steel, others humming with hot power. The percussion concert of cartridges, bolts, and shrapnel had died away into a hush of gasps and swishes pierced by the occasional piccolo note of a scream. Into this lethal melee flew the Lordly Phantasms, flourishing their laspistols and power stilettos, their gowns fluttering as phosphorescently as the wings of radioactive moths, their daemon-masks leering. Tonight they didn’t wish to kill; they intended to capture. So they used their superior laser beams mostly to sting and scorch and put surplus scumniks and techs to flight. From behind a grotesquely warped arch that was strung with ropes of cobweb like a harp, a scum boy leapt to tear Lexandro’s mask from his face as a trophy. The boy was stocky, his greased black hair knotted with a score and more of decorated beads as though his skull was an abacus, or was sprouting a family of shrunken baby heads. The pattern of his facial scars – radiating ridges pigmented with tar or carbon – pictured some many-legged mutant spider. Its body was the boy’s flat nose and its mandibles were his sharpened teeth. Even in the dismal gloom, strobed by laser flashes, the boy’s green eyes gleamed with evident intelligence… and with fierce enmity… and with a kind of fascination, as he weighed the mask in his hand and stared at its former wearer, now revealed. For Lexandro sported no scars whatever on his comely, olive-complexioned face – only a ruby ring through his slim right nostril. Initiation into his high-hab brat gang did not involve mutilation, except perhaps of the emotions. Lexandro’s eyes were dark and lustrous, his teeth pearly, his dusky hair crimped and curled and pomaded.