[Warhammer 40K - The Horus Heresy 21] - Fear to Tread by James Swallow

Author:James Swallow [James Swallow]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Military Fiction, Science Fiction, Warhammer 40K
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-08-15T23:00:00+00:00

TEN

Hidden

Unholy Communion

Old Names

Five drop-ships put down on the harvest plains, landing nose to tail in a battle ring. Tactical squads from the 24th Company lay down the perimeter in moments, securing the small patch of Scoltrum’s surface as a forward operating post. They set up guns and lines of attack fanning out in every direction.

It was the middle of the day on the agri-world, but much of the sunlight was swallowed up by the drifting black clouds of fire smoke that wreathed the sky. Colonial pict-records of the planet showed grain fields that went from horizon to horizon, flatlands of amber wheat-analogue broken only by the narrow spindles of bone-white wind turbine clusters. Those fields were alight now, smothered by advancing lines of orange flame that were visible from low orbit, moving slowly across the landscape as they were pushed by the planet’s constant winds. Someone had set a torch to the farms and left them to burn.

Visibility on the ground was poor, so for the most part the Blood Angels relied on preysight and thermographics to navigate across the scorched wastes; but their objective was too large to be totally hidden by the smoke.

Before it had destroyed itself in a terminal fall towards the surface of the planet, the ship had been a frigate called the Stark Dagger, part of the Signus Cluster’s outer defence squadron. It was not clear exactly what kind of mishap had befallen the vessel, but by the pattern of the debris dispersal, it was apparent the Stark Dagger had come in across the atmosphere at a low angle and broken apart as it crossed the line of interface. Ripping into three sections, the plough-shaped bow and the midships had carved muddy, ashen paths that ran kilometres long through the crop fields. The heavier stern was much further distant, lost in one of the shallow inland seas over the eastern horizon. Plumes of radiation from the cracked power cores of warp engines were visible as scintillating fountains of colour via rad-scan optics, showing like distant aurorae.

Saviour pods from the frigate had fired too late, and they peppered the long crash site of the ship, most of them buried in the harvest world’s soft brown loam.

Captain Nakir sent squads out on jetbike chariots to conduct a survey of the escape capsules, but they reported in the same thing from each they found: many had deployed empty, the rest had mis-fired and killed whatever occupants they might have had on impact. Not one of the pods showed signs that those who fled the Stark Dagger’s destruction had survived.

The rest of the advance units moved on foot, breaking into a pair of formations to make for the two sites where the wreckage was most dense. Nakir himself led the group making for the bow section, and on the insistence of his fellow captain of the Ninth, he had brought men from Sergeant Cassiel’s squad along for their ‘perspective’.

Meros and Cassiel followed Madidus, Nakir’s second-in-command on the ground; the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.