Pandorax Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Maps

  Prelude

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Interlude

  Part Three

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Four

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Interlude

  Part Five

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Postlude

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  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.

  Prelude

  347956.M41 / Fal’shia, Tau First Phase Colony

  With feline grace and the alertness of a hawk, Tzula Digriiz prowled through the benighted corridors of the museum. No light, save the wan orange glow of one of Fal’shia’s moons seeping through a skylight, marked her way and no sound did she make at her passing. Step by silent step, she followed the route she had memorised on her sole previous visit to the museum, pausing only to check and recheck for motion sensors and noise detecting alarms she may have missed on her initial reconnaissance. She glided past priceless artefacts and irreplaceable masterpieces without stopping to give any a second look, her resolve focused solely on her mission. In a former life she would have stripped the place clean and come back for seconds once the dust had settled, but that life was nothing but a memory now, closed off to her ever since the day she’d finally been caught and pressed into the service of the Imperium of Mankind.

  The corridor she was navigating terminated into a vast hall, the light filling the chamber with a lambent glow, not enough to see by but sufficient to denote the outlines of the exhibits and pieces. Manually adjusting the sensitivity of her night-vision goggles, she scanned her new environs for anything that could give away her presence but found nothing. Fortunately for Tzula, her erstwhile hosts practised a political system that preached fairness and equality in all things – the Greater Good, as the tau liked to call it – and as a result suffered very little in the way of crime within their society. So far she had yet to encounter any security measures she would have to evade and there were certainly no guards assigned to watch over the artworks and antiquities. She was even surprised when she turned up for her after hours visit and found the doors locked.

  With a newfound surety that alarm bells were not about to ring nor was a cage about to descend from the ceiling and ensnare her, she made for the far end of the main exhibition hall, though, ever cautious, she made certain to remain silent. It was good practice like this that ensured she’d spent a profitable decade looting the finest riches all across Segmentum Pacificus and a good few years beyond that doing the same in the employ of her new master.

  The works that lined the walls and plinths of the hall were worth the proverbial king’s ransom and purloining a single one of them would set her up for a lifetime, several with all the juvenat treatments she would be able to afford, but even that was too small a price. The people she worked for were more than capable of tracking her wherever she chose to lie low and the ramifications of crossing them didn’t bear thinking about. Her death would be the ultimate consequence, but the route they took her down to reach that destination would be long and gruelling. Besides, her new calling was not without benefits. Her master was teaching her all sorts of new skills and one day, when her apprenticeship was served, she would take his place.

  One piece in particular caught her eye. She turned about and cautiously took a few steps towards it. It was a suit of power armour, Mark V judging by the shape of the helmet, in pristine condition with the exception of a small eye-sized hole in the breastplate where a shot from a fire warrior or gun drone had despatched its former owner. The combination of poor lighting and the green filter of the night-vision goggles meant that Tzula could not make out the colour of the livery, but the clenched fist outlined by a circle on the left pauldron suggested which Chapter was missing an irreplaceable relic. Under the mask of her bodyglove, she allowed herself the slightest smirk. No matter how enlightened or progressive a society may claim to be, give them the opportunity to brag about former victories or conquests and they won’t hesitate to take it. You could not move in the Imperium for fear of stumbling over a statue or monument to some hero or other, even entire worlds dedicated to the sole purpose of reminding the populace of dead saints and martyrs, and several alien races Tzula had encountered down the years sported trophies taken from fallen enemies on the field of battle. For all their claims of inclusivity and mutual assimilation, they had no qualms about displaying the product of their expansion for all to see.

  Conscious that her master was tracking her progress through the bodyglove’s sensors, she turned her attention back to the task at hand and cautiously completed her passage to the back of the hall. There, nestled between an exquisite eldar sculpture older than the tau race itself and a cylindrical device of unspecified origin that Tzula couldn’t begin to guess the purpose of, sat the object she had broken into the museum to liberate: a knife. Not a fancy ceremonial dagger nor a weapon used to wage war, not even a duelling blade or the tool of some worthy figure’s demise. Just a plain knife, its tarnished metal blade attached to a worn wooden handle by a tight binding of frayed leather cord. Some Imperial scholars might have described it as ‘pre-historic’ but in the Imperium that term was a relative one at best. All that Tzula could be certain of was that the blade was very, very old. Perhaps that was why the tau had put it here in the museum, because they thought it a quaint example of a barbaric culture’s roots? Had they the slightest understanding of the thing’s true heritage and what it was capable of, it would have been under lock and key in their deepest, strongest vault pored over by their finest minds until they ascertained how to use it, not merely
left on a plinth in a museum on a world populated almost entirely by artists.

  Carefully peeling off the tight-fitting glove on her right hand to reveal the dark skin underneath – experience had taught her that when performing a delicate task such as this, it was better to rely on the true sense of touch not dulled by the barrier of a second skin – she reached down and delicately grasped the hilt of the knife between her thumb and fingertips. Controlling her breathing, Tzula waited until it had slowed to the point where her lungs were barely moving and, on her next inhale, gently lifted the knife from the inconspicuous plinth upon which it rested.

  The wail of alarms that followed was so loud that Tzula found it difficult to maintain her balance.

  She spun on her heel, about to race back the way she had come when a wall of solid force sprang up mere centimetres in front of her. Turning back she found that she was enclosed on all four sides and above by coruscating energy, trapping her in a prison no more than two metres square. Already having a fair idea of the outcome, she threw the glove she’d removed at one of the walls and watched through her goggles as it disintegrated immediately upon contact. Through the translucent cell she saw security shutters glide into place, barring all exits from the main exhibit hall and when she looked skyward, saw the same happening to the glass in the ceiling. For the second time in her life, Tzula Digriiz, former cat burglar turned agent of the Ordo Malleus, was well and truly trapped.

  ‘What in the name of the Throne have you gone and done this time, girl?’ her master’s voice crackled in her ear. ‘We can hear those alarms from all the way over the other side of the city, and there are fire warrior teams converging on your position.’ His displeasure dripped from every word and the very fact that he’d breached mission protocol to contact her on her vox-bead spoke volumes about how badly wrong the operation had gone.

  ‘I just need a couple of minutes. The damn knife was on a pressure plate and it triggered an energy chamber. It looks similar to the ones the Imalthuti used on–’

  ‘You don’t have two minutes. Those fire warrior teams are on the steps of the museum now.’ The pause that followed was heavy with anticipation. ‘Use it.’

  The anxiety Tzula had been fighting hard to control fought its way to the surface. ‘You know I can’t do that. Even if it does work, how will you–’

  ‘We’ll find you. We have to. Now stop arguing and get out of there.’ The vox-link went dead in her ear. If the tau already knew that it was their human guests who were responsible for the break-in at the museum then her master and his cohort would have to make it off-world in a hurry. Just like she had to. She had never held a knife such as this – precious few throughout the history of mankind had – but she had been well-schooled in the theory of its application and, gripping it blade down in her fist, held it aloft as if she was making to stab thin air. Her forearm tensed as she waited for it to gain purchase but the knife sat there useless in her hands. With the noise of approaching tau growing ever louder, she lowered the blade. Closing her eyes, she raised it again relaxing the muscles in her arm and letting the knife do the work instead. Within seconds she was rewarded and, as the first of the fire warriors reached the shuttered main entrance, the blade twitched as it came into contact with the edges of reality.

  Tzula began to tear through it.

  Shas’ui Bork’an Kop’la, like all those of the tau race, was not one to believe in magic, superstition or the divine. When he tapped in the nine digit code to shut off the museum’s security system and entered the main exhibit hall, he started to suspect that there was more to this universe than the surety of the Greater Good.

  Pulse rifle raised, he ventured over to where he had expected to discover the gue’la woman trapped within the energy cage, but found only the charred remnants of what could have been a glove or gauntlet and a set of what he assumed to be eyewear. The other members of his team scanned the room for any sign of the intruder, butts of rifles rested firmly against their shoulders as the markerlights played across the walls and ceilings. Kop’la signalled to one of them to deactivate the cage. The other fire warrior removed a small handheld pad from his belt and tapped a series of keys, causing the energy field to dissipate with a sharp hum. Kop’la retrieved the eyewear and, after removing his helmet, held them up to his eyes in the vain hope that they may reveal the alien’s cloaked form. The goggles functioned similarly to his armour’s nightvision system, but whereas the tau technology used complex algorithms to compensate for the lack of light and allowed the viewer to see as if they were in daylight, colours and all, the gue’la equivalent was crude but functional, delineating that shrouded by darkness solely in monochrome green. He moved his head in a circular motion, trying to take in the entirety of the chamber, but the only living souls he saw were the eleven other members of his la’rua.

  He was about to discard the primitive device when something in the vicinity of where the energy cage had been caught his attention. There, suspended half a metre from the museum floor, was a glowing vertical slit of energy. As he watched, it faded away to nothing. When he stepped over to experimentally pass his hand through where he thought it had been, he caught the vaguest scent of something sulphuric on the air, but that too was gone as quickly as the glow. He broke his attention away and realised that every member of his la’rua was staring at him, this odd unhelmeted figure waving his hand through thin air while sniffing like a kroot hound.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ he barked to mask his embarrassment. ‘The perimeter is secure so the gue’la thief is still in the building. Split into teams of two and do not report back in to me until you have found her.’ He replaced his helmet and, pairing up with the fire warrior who had deactivated the energy cage, headed for the west wing of the museum to track down the interloper.

  The fire warrior team scoured every square metre of the museum twice before Shas’ui Bork’an Kop’la called off the search for the gue’la female. With shame weighing heavy on his heart, he reported back to Aun Ki’lea that the woman had escaped. The ruler of Fal’shia was disappointed in Kop’la’s failure to apprehend the woman, but the loss to the tau empire was insignificant. Rather than steal one of the priceless heirlooms of their fledgling race, the thief had only taken a small knife recovered from a Third Sphere colony, an artefact of no consequence at all, merely a curiosity that the artisans of Fal’shia had seen fit to display to show how little the gue’la had evolved in all their millennia rampaging across the universe.

  Ki’lea’s words brought him some solace, but Kop’la could not shake the feeling that somehow his inability to capture the woman had run counter to the Greater Good. That feeling would be augmented shortly after when an administrative error meant he was overlooked for the Trial by Fire and he and his la’rua were shipped off to Fi’rios to mop up the remnants of the ork forces the tau had wrestled the world from.

  Though he and his fellow fire warriors fought well, the Be’gel worked their sheer weight of numbers to full advantage, slaying both tau and kroot alike at close quarters. Their fate sealed, Kop’la’s la’rua fought a final, desperate stand atop a rocky outcrop on the arid world’s desert plains, each of his brave fire warriors falling in turn until he was the last one left standing against a horde of the debased alien beasts. Firing wildly, he felled many of the orks but still they pressed on, clambering over the corpses in their frenzied attempt to reach him. His weapon ran dry and, as he was about to start swinging his pulse rifle as an impromptu club, a blow to the side of his head cracked his helmet and smashed him to the hard ground.

  As Kop’la felt the first greenskin blade pierce him close to the heart and looked up to see the brute making ready to deliver the killing blow, his final thought was: where did the gue’la woman go?

  228958.M41 / Undesignated Feral Ice-world,

  Segmentum Tempestus

  Inquisitor Mikhail Dinalt had never been fond of the cold, hailing as he did from a scorched desert world, and as the heavy snow fell, he pulled his cloak
tighter about his shoulders and ploughed on through the thick powder underfoot. Behind him, the six figures that made up his cohort followed in his wake, the three humans among them shivering in the sub-zero temperatures, the xenos and the two gun servitors seemingly oblivious to the adverse conditions.

  ‘We’ll freeze to death if we’re out here much longer,’ said the tall, muscular male at the rear of the group. He wore several furs over his matching leather jacket and trousers, and snow had settled on the wide brim of his hat. The harsh lines and creases of his face were pale, frost had formed on the week’s growth of stubble on his chin and his lips were rapidly turning an unhealthy shade of blue. ‘I didn’t spend all this time hunting for her just to end my days face down in the snow.’

  Dinalt, as he had conditioned himself to do so over their many years together, tuned out the gunman’s moaning and, ignoring him entirely, continued laboriously on. Dinvayo Chao may be one of the finest shots the inquisitor had ever encountered in almost two centuries of service to the Golden Throne, but he was also one of the greatest whingers too. Dinalt had never seen Chao miss; either a shot with his twin bolt pistols or an opportunity to complain about the latest injustice being perpetrated upon him.

  ‘All the intelligence points to this being the correct planet,’ said the woman walking at Dinalt’s shoulder. Her robe was the same deep crimson as that of her master and her voluminous blonde hair cascaded over it all the way down to her waist. ‘According to my charts, the primary settlement is less than three kilometres away from where we put down. We should be there within the hour,’ she added sternly.

  Tryphena Brandd was a recent addition to Dinalt’s band of operatives and though she and Chao clashed regularly, he often had to stay his tongue by dint of her rank of junior interrogator. He considered a retort but thought better of it, turning instead to the xenos. The short, hairy figure loping along beside him had picked up a heavy coating of snow, the white powder almost completely obscuring the orange-brown fur beneath.