The Fall of Cadia by Robert Rath

Author:Robert Rath
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy
ISBN: 9781804075050
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2023-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

Eight

They came for Salvar Ghent in the night.

The plan was to jump him while he was asleep, but even the snatch squad knew that was a foregone conclusion. No one within the citadel walls of Kasr Kraf was sleeping that night. Early on the morning of the seventh day, heretic guns had begun to hammer the fortress city. Shells the size of railcars smashed through the reinforced streets and detonated in underground bunkers. Artillery towers collapsed in on themselves, holed through by ordnance stamped with the names of dark gods. The toppling barrels of their guns blocked streets and crushed whole complexes of hab-bunkers. Special weapons teams made up of combat engineers, outfitted with meltas and Trojan armoured vehicles, worked round the clock to clear channels and allow the movement of troops and vehicles.

The result was not merely a din, but an endless roar of explosions and shivers. Buildings quaked, swayed and often collapsed. Citizens working in the manufactoria and Administratum scribes in the requisition and logistics halls had to stuff their ears with the foam plugs every Cadian carried beside their gas hood and mandatory helmet.

And no one was sleeping.

Perhaps it was because of that aural assault, the drumbeat of artillery, that they were able to get to him without a shot. At least, that was what he told himself as a solace.

He didn’t like to think of all the resources he’d invested in the men guarding his quarters, whom the invaders had dispatched with snapped spines and knives jammed into windpipes.

A terrible, terrible waste.

They’d broken down the door with a shaped charge, come in crouched low, laser-targeters painting the dark walls of his dormitory chamber. Dragged three people out of his bed before realising that none of them were him.

No, he’d been at his night desk, reviewing the day’s ledger.

‘If you’d asked, I would have let you in,’ he’d said, dropping the accounts in his automated incineration bin as the targeting beams snapped onto his chest.

He had not been surprised when they dragged him out from behind the desk, bound his hands, and put a bag on his head. Indeed, he’d always assumed it might end like this, and that sense only grew stronger as word filtered up his distribution chain that provosts were asking questions, and a few card-dealers had gone missing.

What had surprised him, though, was who had finally broken down the door.

Not the provosts, or even the Officio Prefectus – but fully outfitted Kasrkin, bearing the markings of the Cadian Eighth.

They asked him no questions, and that was fine, because he wouldn’t have answered them. If questions came at all, they would come from someone whose lapels were weighed down with rank pins heavier than those of a captain. At least, that’s what he assumed when he heard the Taurox doors slam closed, they fixed sound-mufflers over his ears, and the vehicle merely slowed for checkpoints, rather than stopped. Then it was out of the Taurox, with two soldiers hooking his elbows, and an hour of walking on polished floors.

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