Steel Tread (Warhammer 40,000), page 1
More tales of the Astra Militarum from Black Library
CADIA STANDS
A novel by Justin D Hill
CADIAN HONOUR
A novel by Justin D Hill
TRAITOR ROCK
A novel by Justin D Hill
HONOURBOUND
A novel by Rachel Harrison
THE LAST CHANCERS: ARMAGEDDON SAINT
A novel by Gav Thorpe
SHADOWSWORD
A novel by Guy Haley
BANEBLADE
A novel by Guy Haley
IRON RESOLVE
A novella by Steve Lyons
STEEL DAEMON
A novella by Ian St. Martin
YARRICK
An omnibus edition of the novels Imperial Creed, The Pyres of Armageddon, the novella Chains of Golgotha and several short stories by David Annandale
GAUNT’S GHOSTS: THE FOUNDING
An omnibus edition of the novels First and Only, Ghostmaker and Necropolis by Dan Abnett
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Prologue
Act one
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Act two
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Act three
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Epilogue
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Avenging Son’
A Black Library Publication
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 might of His inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, He is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so that His may continue to burn.
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. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future,
there is only war.
PROLOGUE
Hadeya Etsul gritted her teeth behind her rebreather mask as smoke and heat haze danced about her. Gunfire poured down on her tank from the walls of the ravine, bullets rattling against the hull like driven hail. Fear and panic fought to master her, but Etsul thrust them to the back of her mind. She had her duties. Death would have to wait.
‘The Emperor protects,’ she told herself, then bit back a yelp as Oathkeeper rang like a struck bell. The Leman Russ tilted with the force of impact before settling back on the steel coils of its suspension.
‘Damage report.’ Commander Masenwe’s voice was calm, projected over the vox from his bucket seat above and behind Etsul’s gunnery station as little more than a static-laced whisper through her headset.
‘Keep your mind on what’s before you.’
It had been a favourite saying of her mother’s, one of many Etsul still heard as clearly as though the woman stood behind her. Normally that sensation of connection made her feel by turns comforted or forlorn. Here, now, it brought the creeping sensation that her mother’s shade lurked close by. The idea was incongruous, a nonsense, yet it sank its teeth in and wouldn’t let go. Etsul felt the icy touch of imagined breath upon her nape and pictured her mother waiting to welcome her through the veil.
The hair rose on Etsul’s neck and her skin prickled. She shook her head and spat a curse into the plastek muzzle of her rebreather.
‘Throne alive, pull yourself together,’ she breathed.
‘Vesko, damage report?’ Commander Masenwe repeated. This time his words came to Etsul more clearly. She shot a glance through smoke and firelight, to where Yvgan Vesko occupied the driver’s station. Like her, the big man sat on a fold-out seat of plasteel and flakfoam. Sweat slicked his bald pate. Drops had gathered in his eyebrows and Etsul watched them clinging to hair, defying gravity.
‘Hit to right flank armour, directed explosive, but she’s holding, sir,’ said Vesko. She saw his jaw move behind his rebreather as his mouth formed the words, but with the tank’s power plant roaring and enemy fire hammering the hull, she heard them only through the vox headset clamped over her ears.
‘Oathkeeper wouldn’t let us down,’ Masenwe replied. ‘Maintain combat speed and stay close on Commander Lethwan’s tail. Only two hundred yards to the end of the canyon, then we’ll make the Emperor proud!’
Masenwe’s calm did not reassure Etsul. Heat washed over her as though she stood too near an open furnace door. Smoke coiled about her, alarmingly thick and dark. She could taste it, overpowering her mask, worming in. Etsul’s chest hitched, and she stifled a coughing fit.
Their loader, Osk, was supposed to be extinguishing the fire in the bowels of the tank, but he hadn’t spoken for what felt like hours.
Etsul wanted to look back and check on him.
Fear of what might meet her eyes held her rigid at her station.
Today is the day we die.
The thought startled Etsul. It felt alien, an intrusion. She screwed her eyes tight shut and felt sweat trickle over the scrunched-up lids. She grubbed it away with the back of one fist then opened them again on firelight and smoke. The tank shuddered as it bulled along the canyon’s rubble-strewn floor. Etsul had to look back, to see what had become of Osk, to check whether the fire was about to ignite her tank suit or touch off their shell magazine.
She didn’t.
Couldn’t.
‘Etsul, target one-hundred-twenty yards ahead, fifty degrees right, elevation twenty degrees, confirm?’
Masenwe’s voice broke her paralysis. Etsul applied herself to her instruments, checking Oathkeeper’s glowing auspex screen then pressing her eyes to the rubberised viewing scope. The tank jolted, mashing her face hard against the hot metal and plastek. She hissed with pain. Eyes watering, she tried to focus on the juddering blur before her. She caught snatches of dark ferrocrete rushing past to either side, canyon walls studded with the dark hollows of windows like eyes. Watercolour smudges of green showed where Croatoas’ verdant undergrowth was reclaiming the ruins. Above the ravine was a strip of open sky turned bruise purple and umber by twilight. All around were the enemy, too many to count, too swift to focus on. Etsul made out humanoid silhouettes. Their outlines were distorted. Spurs and deformations rendered them nightmarish. Her one fixed point was Commander Lethwan’s tank, Restitution in Blood, just ahead of them. Unlike Oathkeeper, Restitution had side sponsons. The terrain was so close they struck sparks from out-thrust chunks of rubble as the tank charged for the canyon’s end.
‘Gunnery Sergeant Etsul, do you have the target?’ snapped Masenwe. She blinked, gasped, tried again. Still, she couldn’t focus. The harder Etsul tried, the more sluggish her thoughts became.
‘I… Commander, I don’t…’
Restitution in Blood transformed from a speeding tank to an expanding fireball.
Vesko yelled through the vox and tried to rein Oathkeeper in. Leman Russ battle tanks might not be the fastest vehicles, but they could stop quickly and were almost balletic when manoeuvring. Yet in his eagerness to escape the trap, Vesko had left too narrow a gap, and the collision came regardless.
Etsul’s head hit metal.
She sprawled between her seat and Vesko’s, fire-heat raking her flesh.
Then came a violent cacophony. Rapid metallic clangs, the wasp-whine of ricochets, a sound like tenderisers thudding against meat in her father’s abattoir back on Tsegoh. Something hot and wet splashed her face.
Etsul felt boneless, weak as a fever victim. She tried to stand. She pressed her palms to the hot metal of the deck and sought to push herself upright but could not. Etsul slumped and turned to see Osk’s limp form sprawled amidst the flames filling Oathkeeper’s belly. Fire danced gleefully over his corpse.
Etsul dragged her eyes away. Beside her, Vesko leant against a stowage box. His gaze was unfocused. Blood drizzled from a cut on his scalp.
Etsul forced her head up, feeling as though she were deep underwater. And truly, she realised, her face was wet, but the liquid felt too warm to be the ocean. Commander Masenwe was slumped in his chair, limbs dangling like a doll’s, blood running in rivulets down his arms and drizzling onto Etsul from his crooked fingers. The turret was a ragged mess of bullet holes. So was her commander.
A detached part of Etsul’s mind noted that it would have taken an autocannon, or something even heavier, to inflict
‘We have to get out of here,’ she croaked. Realising her mistake, she activated her vox-mic. ‘Vesko, we have to get out of here! Can you drive?’
Etsul shook him by the shoulder until he looked up. She felt a spark of relief at the recognition in his eyes.
‘Vesko, we need to go! Now!’
He nodded with renewed purpose, bending over his station while Etsul tried to calm her breath and turned to her own. As gunnery sergeant, she was the Leman Russ’ second-in-command. Masenwe’s burden now lay upon her shoulders. He had left her in charge of a burning tank, trapped prow-deep in wreckage and surrounded by foes.
‘Worry what is, let the rest go,’ Etsul told herself.
Another of her mother’s sayings. They just had to clear the ravine before the fire consumed them. If they could manage that then maybe they could bail out and escape the enemy.
Somehow.
Etsul grabbed her controls, only to snatch her hands back as searing heat tore up her arms. She looked at her palms. They were scorched raw. It didn’t seem possible that the fire could have heated the metal of the tank’s interior to such a degree without consuming her and Vesko both.
Today is the day we die.
This time it was a whisper in her ear, the breath of a gheist.
Etsul turned to face Vesko and saw he was shouting. His eyes bulged with fear.
She tried to issue her orders, but it was as though her rebreather had melted to her flesh. She couldn’t speak through its cloying mass. Blood pattered down, a carmine baptism of her short-lived command. Flames licked about Etsul, dancing over her clothes, her skin. The enemy were right outside the tank. She saw them in her mind’s eye, pressed against the white-hot plasteel of the hull, flesh sizzling, fat spitting like meat on a griddle as they heaved inwards from every side.
Oathkeeper gave a terrible groan, a submersible gone too deep. Etsul cast about for escape. She saw nothing but flames and smoke. She imagined the venerable tank’s machine-spirit straining to resist the mass of bubbling flesh squeezing ever tighter.
’I know you’ll make us proud…’ came her mother’s voice from deep within the inferno.
Oathkeeper’s hull gave way.
Hadeya Etsul screamed.
She jolted awake with a grunt. One hand was halfway to the laspistol at her hip before she remembered where she was. She felt the reassuring solidity of the restraint throne into which she was belted, heard the basso roar of the Valkyrie’s engines as it soared over the Mandriga Delta. Etsul’s redeployment orders were a hard knot of folded parchment stuffed into her breast pocket. She didn’t need to check them to recall what they said. She’d read and reread them enough times, but they never relayed anything different, no matter what she might wish.
She was to report to Mandriga command. She was to take command of her own tank. She was to do so effective immediately.
Etsul eased back, clenching and unclenching her hands unconsciously. Her palms still tingled as though they’d just been burned, yet the layers of synthskin looked fresh and unhurt.
Her seat was one of five on the rear wall of the troop bay. Five more faced it. Only a handful of the thrones were occupied, by Etsul and a few other officers of the Astra Militarum. Besides them, a pair of troopers manned door guns that jutted from the Valkyrie’s open flanks. Their flak coats billowed in the wind. Their helm visors glinted in the bruised light of Croatoas’ sun.
She tried to gauge if anyone had noticed her discomfort. Being consolidated into a Cadian regiment was daunting enough without making a poor first impression.
The two gunners had their backs to her. They watched the skies, and the ruins and mangrove swamps that rolled past below. One of the passengers, a Geskan judging by his neck tattoos, was snoring. The other two were awake. Etsul could see by his violet-tinged irises that one was Cadian born. He had a shock of close-cropped white hair and a captain’s insignia on his uniform. His eyes lingered on her then flicked away in apparent disinterest.
The other passenger’s cyan uniform and elaborate brocade marked him as hailing from the Maesmoch Clanguard. His skin and eyes were even darker than her own. Where Etsul buzz-cut her hair to stubble, the Maesmochan wore his in elaborate braids. He offered her a sympathetic smile and tapped his vox headset. She took his meaning and keyed her own, allowing him to speak to her over the howl of the gunship’s engines.
‘Lieutenant Horathio Aswold, Maesmoch Seven-Seventieth,’ he said, then winced. ‘Cadian Forty-Ninth, sorry. I am not used to that yet.’
‘Lieutenant Hadeya Etsul,’ she replied. ‘You’re consolidating too?’
‘By the grace of the Emperor I have that honour.’
‘You’re still wearing your old uniform.’
He glanced down at himself then grinned at her.
‘Sentimental, I know, but I’m giving it one last outing. I have commanded three different tanks in the colours of my home world, and that begs a little commemoration. Let the Emperor witness me in the uniform one last time. Let Him know that as a Maesmochan I was glorious.’
Etsul chuckled despite herself. She had left her own Tsegohan fatigues in the barracks back at Helbor, folded crisply despite the bloodstains that had ruined them. Presumably, they had been incinerated by now.
Her faint smile died.
Something of her thoughts must have shown on her face. Aswold’s expression grew serious.
‘Hadeya Etsul, was it? I heard about that business in Yarroe Canyon. How did you get your tank out of that ambush?’
‘The canyon, yes,’ said Etsul, grimacing as she stilled her hands mid-clench. ‘We fought our way out.’
Aswold watched her expectantly. When she did not continue, he held up his hands.
‘My apologies, lieutenant. You can take the lad out of the family commune, but never the reverse it seems. I am too used to everyone’s business being mine and vice versa. But for what it is worth, I think what you did was heroic. Commander dead, squadron cut to pieces, a hundred or so heretics raining death on your position and you still got your tank out of there!’
Etsul was surprised to see that spark light his eyes again.
‘It has been a week of debriefings, medicae tents, prayers and miserable farewells,’ she said, trying to keep the bitterness from her voice. ‘The squadron got cut to pieces, and we made it out with our tail between our legs.’
‘You extracted a valuable war engine from an impossible situation, and scored four armour kills into the bargain, from what I read,’ Aswold countered.
‘I lost Commander Masenwe.’
‘He was dear to you?’
‘He was my commander, and I trusted him,’ Etsul replied sharply. Aswold’s expression became grave, the mask of youthful excitement set aside.
‘I read the after-action report on Yarroe Canyon just last night,’ he said. Seeing her brows draw down, he held up a forestalling hand. ‘Not just you, I inloaded every file I had clearance for on the commanders of Eleventh Company. I am a thorough man. I like to know who I am fighting alongside.’
Etsul felt a stab of concern. She had been too busy even to consider that she now had clearance to do such a thing.
She realised that Aswold was still speaking.
‘You did well, Lieutenant Etsul, though you hardly need my validation. You have the Emperor’s, and that is all any of us needs. I am glad to fight alongside you.’
Etsul’s hands twitched. She made a point not to inspect her tingling palms.
She was saved from finding a reply by a squawk of static. A brass-chased human skull was set above the door to the cockpit, its eye sockets home to lumen bulbs and jaws stuffed with a vox-grille. Etsul had assumed when she boarded that the relic was the remains of some favoured pilot.
‘Two minutes to Mandriga command,’ the co-pilot’s voice blared through the vox-grille. ‘Secure and brace. Prepare for combat landing, this is a potential hot zone. The Emperor protects.’
‘The Emperor protects,’ echoed Etsul automatically, making the sign of the aquila. Aswold and the Cadian captain did likewise, and all three held on to their restraint straps as the Valkyrie’s engines screamed. The aircraft banked, affording Etsul a view of fortifications and trenches amidst the marshes below. People swarmed around the site. Olive-green tents formed neat rows across what had once been an industrial lot. Armoured vehicles rumbled along a crumbling transitway raised on thick ferrocrete columns. Imperial banners flew from smokestacks above vine-choked rockcrete ruins.
