Renegades by Mike Brooks

Author:Mike Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2022-08-22T13:59:55+00:00

THE RUSTBLOODS

Success begets success. That was an adage as true in the theatre of war as it was in so many other contexts.

The fall of the Beharis System was fast, brutal, and comprehensive. The Alpha Legion under Solomon’s command had not actually killed that many people, in the grand scheme of things; it was the identity of the deceased that mattered. High-ranking officials, military commanders, and senior members of the Ecclesiarchy had all been wiped away by swift surgical strikes – and even, to Solomon’s surprised pleasure, an incredibly precise virus, courtesy of the Sons of Venom. The remaining population had in no way all converted to worshipping the Ruinous Powers, but they were rudderless and leaderless, and the coordination of their resistance had been effectively broken.

‘Everything is proceeding ahead of schedule, Lord Akurra,’ the human known as Tolly Krace reported from one knee, appearing on the bridge of the Unseen via a communication hololith. Krace was a factor of the Faceless, but it turned out that his history of crime and smuggling had left him with a good working knowledge of where important resources were located, and he had proved to be highly capable in matters of logistics, as well as almost entertainingly ruthless. Solomon had had to break him from his habit of addressing all legionnaires as ‘Lord Alpharius’, but other than that, the man was a useful find.

Solomon inspected his data-slate, taking the details in at a glance, then passed it to Roek Ghulclaw and dismissed Krace by the simple measure of flicking a switch. The commander of the Guns of Freedom studied the read-

out, then nodded. ‘Good. This will go a long way to resupplying my forces.’

‘But not ours. Promethium will fuel our vehicles, and we can eat mortal rations as well as we can our own, but we need bolter rounds and ceramite plating, not las power packs and flak vests,’ said today’s Alpharius. Solomon was still struggling to tell them apart, but it was more force of habit than anything else. Whichever member of the Faceless represented them at any given time, they apparently had the authority to do so, and that was all that mattered.

‘Which dictates our choice of next target,’ Solomon said. He was not actually intending to give anyone else a say in the matter, but so long as it fulfilled the needs of his warband, he was unlikely to hear much in the way of dissent. He called up the display on the tactical hololith and a slightly fuzzy, translucent image of a planet winked into life. ‘Anthras. The heart of the Anthras System, which is itself situated at the mouth of the Angel’s Way, a stable warp route into the heart of Ultramar.’

‘And which is a forge world of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ said Alpharius.

‘Anthras supplies at least six Imperial Space Marine Chapters,’ Solomon pointed out. ‘Its forges and stores contain enough materiel to sustain us for a year or more of incessant warfare, especially now we have the captured ships from the Beharis System to act as carriers.

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