Read 03 - Savage Scars Online

Authors: Andy Hoare - (ebook by Undead)

Tags: #Warhammer 40K

03 - Savage Scars

 

 
A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL
Savage Scars

 

Rogue Trader - 03
Andy Hoare
(An Undead Edit 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.

 

 

“In the year of Our Emperor 742.M41, the most glorious forces of
the Imperium launched a crusade of conquest into the Lithesh Sector, to regain
control of those worlds so long estranged from the Rule of Terra by warp storm
activity and the raids of the pernicious eldar. But woe, for it was discovered
that far worse a fate had befallen those benighted worlds. A previously unknown
xenos species called the tau had infiltrated and undermined the proper
governance of a string of worlds along the edge of the celestial anomaly known
as the Damocles Gulf. Foremost amongst those to have discovered this duplicity
was the rogue trader Lucian Gerrit, patriarch of the Clan Arcadius.

The Imperium could not, would not, stand by as more worlds fell from the
fold. The firebrand preacher Cardinal Esau Gurney of Brimlock preached a full
crusade against the tau, holding that the Gulf must be breached, the tau home
world located and the entire species exterminated.

The call to arms rang out across the sector and beyond, and was answered.
The Space Marines of the Iron Hands, White Scars, Ultramarines and Scythes of
the Emperor heeded that call, as did a dozen planetary governors who raised new
regiments for the Imperial Guard to prosecute the Damocles Gulf Crusade. The
rogue trader Lucian answered the call too, his Warrant of Trade earning him a
place on the crusade’s command council.

But so too did the figure of Inquisitor Grand, and the council soon split
into two factions—those centred around Grand and Gurney, who desired only the
complete destruction of the xenos tau, and those allied to the rogue trader, who
sought in various degrees honour, glory or profit, but not dishonourable
slaughter.

The first battles were fought on the nearside of the Damocles Gulf, and
saw the world of Sy’l’kell conquered with relative ease and a tau fleet bested
at Hydass. But already the council was being torn asunder by internecine
rivalries and Gerrit’s daughter Brielle appeared to assault the inquisitor, for
reasons unknown, and flee. She was assumed dead thereafter, much to her father’s
despair, though he still had his son Korvane to stand by him.

Having purged the world of Viss’el, the crusade pierced the Damocles Gulf,
and fell upon the world of Pra’yen with the righteous fury of the faithful. But
disaster almost befell the Emperor’s warriors there, for it proved that the tau
were a far greater threat than any had imagined. The tau were not some minor
race residing on but a single world, but were possessed of an entire stellar
realm.

As the crusade pressed in to capture the capital world of the Dal’yth
system, Dal’yth Prime, more tau forces closed in. The fate of the Damocles Gulf
Crusade would come to rest in the hands of three individuals—the White Scars
Veteran Sergeant Sarik, the rogue trader Lucian Gerrit, and his daughter
Brielle, who had fallen by her own hubris into the hands of the tau water caste
envoy called Aura.

Mustering its forces, the crusade prepared for “Operation Pluto”—the
Dal’yth Prime landings. All would depend on those landings, and the actions of
but three very different individuals.”

 

—Extract from preface of
The Truth
of the Damocles Gulf Crusade
(unpublished, author unknown)

 

 
Chapter One

 

 

Deep within the dense stellar cluster that was the crucible and the
cradle of the alien species known as the tau, the frigate
Nomad
was a
dark shadow against the roiling blue nebulae permeating the entire region. The
cluster seethed with anomalous energies not witnessed anywhere else in the
galaxy, a phenomenon that the most learned of Navigator-seers and
astro-cognoscenti had entirely failed to explicate. The stars here were young
and the very fabric of space somehow charged with raw potential, and the same
appeared to be true of the species that had evolved here. The tau had developed
from primitive nomads to a heretically advanced, space-faring empire within a
handful of millennia. The tau’s very existence was now a threat to the
Imperium’s rule in the area, and the Damocles Gulf Crusade had been set in
motion to restore order and adherence to the rule of the God-Emperor of Mankind.

But Veteran Sergeant Sarik cared little for inexplicable nebulae or esoteric
stellar phenomena. He didn’t even care a great deal about the tau or any other
alien species, so long as they adhered to the one, defining principle by which
he himself led his life. That principle was honour, and to Sarik, everything
else was secondary.

Sarik was standing on the bridge of the
Nomad
, the lambent nebulae
washing his weather-beaten, honour-scarred face and causing his folded eyes to
glow with ice-blue luminescence. His polished white armour glinted in the light
of alien suns. Sarik was the master of his vessel, a
one-and-a-half-kilometre-long Nova-class frigate bearing the white and red
livery of the White Scars Chapter of the Space Marines, but truth be told, he
held little love for the role. He yearned to fight on solid ground, to engage
his foe not in ship-to-ship combat at a thousand kilometres but in the brutal,
face-to-face savagery of close-quarters melee.

Turning his back on the lancet-paned forward viewing portal, Sarik strode the
length of the bridge, reading in every step the deep throb of the plasma drives
as they propelled the
Nomad
through the void at full speed. The air was
heavy with the smoky scent of the purifying unguents used to bless the vessel,
its machine systems and the crew that tended her. The scent reminded Sarik of
the cold, windswept plains of home, the world of Chogoris, for the Techmarines
of the White Scars worked into the incense the resin of the rockrose gathered
from the uplands of the north. Dozens of sounds filled the bridge, from the
chattering of the cogitation banks and logic engines to the muted conversation
of the bridge-serfs as they coordinated dozens of secondary operations, none of
which were of immediate concern to the master of a vessel crewed by several
thousand souls.

One of the bridge-serfs was a man called Loccum, a veteran with the rank of
conversi
, an appointment that honoured him with the right to address his
Adeptus Astartes masters directly. Unlike many Adeptus Astartes, however, Sarik
eschewed the aloofness so often displayed by the superhuman Space Marines, and
while he might not converse with his crew or others as peers, he nonetheless
valued their skills and their opinions.

Loccum glanced up as Sarik approached, and reported, “Pathfinder squadron is
approaching segment delta-nine, brother-sergeant.” The man was permanently
connected to the frigate’s machine-systems by a complex web of mind impulse link
cables, and every fragment of visible skin was a matrix of Chogoran tribal
tattoos. “In-loading remote telemetry now.”

“Shunt it through, please, Loccum,” Sarik replied, frowning as he focussed on
the icons tracking their way across the glowing blue screen of his command
lectern. Machine chatter blurted out of the bridge phono-casters, a harsh sound
that grated on Sarik’s nerves whenever he heard it. He was reminded again how
much he yearned for the howl of wind in his ears and the feel of a clean breeze
on his face. The machine noise cut out as suddenly as it had appeared, a series
of figures and icons resolving on the lectern’s screen.

“Damn,” Sarik cursed, as he took in the full import of the lines of data
scrolling across the lectern. A semi-circular form appeared at the edge of the
screen, representing the enemy-held planet towards which the pathfinders were
probing. In between the squadron and that planet three new returns blinked
ominously. The Imperial Navy pathfinder squadron ranging ahead of the
Nomad
were the elite of the crusade’s scout forces, the master of each vessel a man
Sarik knew personally. He would not see them blunder into an alien trap, not
while he could influence matters.

“Confirmed,” said Loccum. “Three capital-scale defence platforms.”

“Initiate tight-beam communion,” ordered Sarik. “We have to warn them.”

Loccum hesitated, causing Sarik to look up in response to his silence.
“Well?”

“Brother-sergeant,” the bridge-serf replied. “Orders from fleet.”

“I am aware of fleet’s orders, conversi,” Sarik said, using the serf’s rank
title to remind him of his status. “If we must risk detection, so be it.”

Loccum bowed deeply in response to Sarik’s order, and turned to a nearby vox
terminal. The data script that was being fed back to the
Nomad
before
being relayed to the bulk of the fleet continued to scroll across the lectern.
The three icons that represented the alien defence platforms indicated that they
were deployed in a relatively tight cluster, approximately 100,000 kilometres
from the world they protected. Sarik’s lip curled as he recalled the last time
the fleet had faced one of those platforms. Then, it had been just one platform,
but so heavily armed it had inflicted a fearsome toll on the Damocles Gulf
Crusade fleet. Men had died by the thousand, screaming silently into the void as
their vessels had burned around them, a death that Sarik considered an
unsuitable one for such brave servants of the Imperium.

That station had finally been destroyed when Sarik himself had led a boarding
action, consisting of a composite force of Space Marines drawn from the White
Scars, Ultramarines and Scythes of the Emperor Chapters. The Space Marines had
destroyed that platform’s power plant, sending it burning like a meteor through
the atmosphere of the world the alien tau knew as Pra’yen.

Sarik glanced up at the conversi, who noted his attention and replied,
“Seventy per cent, brother-sergeant.”

Grunting, Sarik resumed his study of the lectern’s screen. He was looking for
any sign of tau vessels, praying that the pathfinders would not be drawn into an
ambush. The scout vessels were built for speed and stealth, and would stand
little chance if they were engaged. The fleet had already faced a sizeable tau
force as it had pushed into the system, and communications intercepts indicated
that more were incoming.

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