Space Marine Read online

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  SPACE MARINE

  Ian Watson

  v1.2 (2011.11)

  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.

  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 s
ides. 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.

  The scum kid seemed about to fit the mask to his own face so as to hide his savage features… or to become, for a few moments, the reflexion of Lexandro who lived such an unimaginable, foreign life. As the boy strove to imagine that life, so his countenance rippled, the tattooed spider twitching and convulsing.

  “High-hab swine,” came a voice from other shadows; and Lexandro pivoted – to spy a tech boy as tall as himself, blond, lightly scarred with some pious runes nicking one cheek. The tech’s azure gaze raked Lexandro contemptuously, yet also somewhat longingly.

  “We labour for you. We’re your bulwark against the under-scum. Yet you treat us all as playthings.” The boy was putting on a high-hab accent that a rich brat could understand.

  “Join us, then,” invited Lexandro loftily. “Claw your way upward. Serve the lordly ones. Partake of pleasures. But meanwhile…” He swivelled and fired his laspistol towards the tattooed boy in case that one thought to exploit the distraction, burning his target’s hand so that the scum kid dropped his trophy.

  “My mask, I believe.”

  Lexandro swung and fired the other way, just as the tech boy was in the very act of throwing his knife. Lexandro rolled across rubble, tearing and soiling his silks, yet retrieving the mask. Older Phantasms were hustling a wounded tech towards him. Both of the other boys promptly scarpered.

  “We have us some scum for the cooking pot too!” cried Raphaelo Florienborque, who had never strayed into a kitchen in his life. Attired in his pouting purple daemon’s mask, he escorted a bucking, snarling, tattooed warrior bound with electrocuffs and firmly gripped by two Phantasms. The warrior’s oaths were quite incomprehensible.

  “One of each, one of each!” Raphaelo exulted. “And now we’ll give them the unique burn of a lifetime. Ah yes, cuffed together – united in their profound exploration, their deep-delving expedition down the taproot of Trazior. We honour their clans, we grace their gangs. Their names will live in legend. Never before, Lordly chums, never before!” And so the Phantasms propelled their two prisoners in the direction of the heat-sink.

  Most of the undercity was clammy and chill, though not in the vicinity of the thermal spike. The air, though foul, had already been clement. Before long, the temperature was positively genial. Between pillars and columns – across a subterranean plain of debris – the expedition was soon catching glimpses of a tarnished wall curving gradually away to right and left. The Lordly Phantasms were well aware of techs and scumniks trailing them furtively on either side, wary of their lasers. Indeed, this hidden audience of mutual foes delighted Raphaelo who described loudly and floridly what was going to happen to the captives. If he had not brayed thus, how would those who skulked alongside in the gloom have fully appreciated the final act of the drama which they must necessarily miss witnessing?

  Eventually the brats arrived at the plasteel wall and burned entry through the rusted seal into a sultry, branching passageway. After some searching in the entrails of the massive wall, they located an insulated, though hot, hatch – and undogged it.

  Had it not been for their masks, the Phantasms’ faces must surely have blistered – a gulf of rising furnace-air yawned beyond that hatch. Hastily, so as not to ruin their own complexions, the Phantasms launched their two shrieking prisoners.

  To everyone’s surprise, the bodies of the tech and the scum warrior stayed in full view, soaring and bobbing on convection currents of superheated gases as if trying to swim away from the wall; though the bodies were obviously changing in texture as they cooked. They did not fall at all. Raphaelo slammed the hatch in petulant frustration, burning his hand.

  And then the Lordly Phantasms returned to the upper heights to party.

  NOT LONG AFTER, Lexandro also tumbled – not down the inside of the heat-sink, but certainly parallel to it. Lord Spinoza claimed that his Calculator Maximus was indulging in some financial irregularities. Perhaps this was true; perhaps not. D’Arquebus Senior’s pedantic excuses made no sense. Thus he – and his wife, and two spoiled daughters, and his son – all fell, demoted insultingly and perhaps murderously, to tech territory…

  …from which Lexandro knew that he must escape quickly.

  Now his father was a mere Tabulator to the Dorcas clan, clients of Lord Spinoza – charged with inspecting the activities of even lesser sub-contractors.

  Not for Lexandro those narrow, serpentine alleys dissecting a jumbled jigsaw of fumy factories where teeming jealous families festered out their lives, crafting gears or pistons, axles or armour plating. Not for Lexandro those thronged elephantine courtyards and grim vaulted catacombs to which glass cables delivered only a diluted memory of distant sunshine, and where ventilator gargoyles exhaled stale breath which had been refiltered fifty times already. Oh no, not for a brat who had worn the obscene, scented silks. Not for Lexandro the dubious privilege of being surgically altered so that he could operate a lathe more speedily!

  Fortuitously, there had of late been a fierce trade war in part of Trazior’s larger sister spire, Titania – Trazior, that trio of bleached, leprous giantesses fused from the waist down was popularly known, indeed, as “the Three Sisters”. The dispute had escalated into rabid anarchy; and the local garrison of the Planetary Defence Force suffered heavy casualties in suppressing the wilder excesses of this social spasm. Now their commander must dragoon several tech or merchant gangs from the Oberon spire into the ranks.

  Which might prove to be no bad fortune for those recruits…

  By such a route they might escape from the niches of their birth, and gain access to something better – to better weapons, possibly to some real food different from synthcake and synthgruel. A gang leader could hope to rise up the hierarchy of a hive. A lucky stalwart might gain the patronage of some powerful upper-hab clan or even of a noble. Yet the Defence Force offered a chance – admittedly small – of subsequently entering the Imperial Guard and leaving the claustrophobic hives of Necromunda entirely for other worlds. Other worlds, and wars…

  Swallowing his pride, Lexandro inveigled, connived, and bribed his way as a junior shrimp into the very Dorcas clan gang which his father had heard would soon be pressed into service – an action that grieved his parents. For his sisters needed brotherly protection if they were to remain worthy to marry into the Dorcas clan, and so in turn protect the futu
re of the fallen d’Arquebus family. An absent Lexandro could ruin this chance.

  Lexandro did not care. “You failed us, old man,” he told his father.

  “I am not old yet,” his father demurred pathetically.

  “You soon will be, down here!” was his son’s retort.

  And so the day came when, stripped of their weapons, the Dorcas gang were herded to the garrison block nestling in the shell of the hive hard by the gateway fortress which guarded access and egress for the land-trains.

  Members of several gangs, from earliest teens to twenties, crowded the cracked plastic benches in the reception vestibule or squatted on the floor, awaiting processing, a slow operation. Wary troopers directed stun guns at the medley of bodies in case of disorder, for there were tensions and animosities. Except for the matter of who held the weapons, there seemed little distinction between gang members and the scarred, tattooed troopers clad in olive-drab hive tunics hung with amulets. The recruits’ lexicon of facial scars and tattoos spelled out clan and gang allegiances; similar scarifications signalled the troopers’ own kindred origin.

  On the plasteel-panelled walls hung blurred holographic posters showing the exuberant, ostentatious architecture within the Palatine Hive where the lord of Necromunda held court – and a view of a balloon-wheeled land-train traversing crimson and orange dunes of chemical residue in one of the ash deserts. A recorded voice crackled from a wall speaker. “Lord Helmawr’s peace prevails here. The Emperor’s peace prevails. Abuse Lord Helmawr’s peace, and you die. Violate the Emperor’s peace, and you are damned—” A different voice interrupted the loudspeaker’s soothing threats. “Next: Zen Sharpik, known as Nostrils.”

  A burly, pug-faced adolescent with a violet coxcomb and a bone through his nose slouched towards the door that led to further processing, or rejection. Such a brute as Nostrils would obviously be welcomed unless he tested out as dangerously insane. Such sharks caught up in the net of press-ganging were generally ideal raw material for the Guard. Yet numerous younger sprats swam with a gang too. Some might need to be tossed out; indeed it was these younger fry who mostly glared at one another.