Fire rattled over the Marines' heads and Salk realised the fire from the spaceport was being drawn into the crowds now swarming over the rubble behind him. 'Now!' he voxed, and the surviving Marines outran the approaching edge of the crowd, charging towards the lone spacecraft. Salk sprayed bolter fire at any glimpse of emerald and Krin ripped a plasma shot into the ground by the Polios heads' entourage, forcing them to delay embarkation as they scattered from the incoming fire.
Salk felt small arms fire impacting against the ground all around him as he ran, ringing off his armour. He switched to semi-auto and flicked shots off at the bodyguard trying to drag the dignitaries towards the ship. Two fell, and another spasmed as bolt pistol shots from Nicias tore through him. Kar-rick sprayed shells around the rear of the ship and the bodyguards fell back, trying to put themselves between the incoming fire and the dignitaries.
Salk could see the heads of Cartel Polios now, clad in impractical aristocratic dress with so many layers they looked corpulent and farcical as they scrambled around the rear of the ship, trying to shelter behind the sternward landing gear. The bodyguards were opening fire at the Marines and the crowds spilling over the concourse, but they didn't have the range of the Marines' disciplined bolter fire. A quick volley of snapped shots from Salk took one man's head off and knocked another off his feet like a punch to the gut. Karrick kept the rest pinned down and Krin vaporised a handful of troopers trying to bring a missile launcher to bear.
Salk reached the prow of the ship, firing all the time, switching magazines as Nicias covered him with pistol fire and then sniping at the bodyguards through the landing gear.
'Get aboard!' voxed Salk to Nicias. Covered by Karrick, Nicias ran round the side of the ship and threw the prisoner over the extended boarding ramp and into the passenger compartment. A spray of fire sparked off his armour, tearing chunks from the ceramite as he vaulted his huge form into the ship.
Krin was next, then Salk and Karrick firing a full-auto volley as they clambered into the ship.
Inside, the small compartment was luxuriantly upholstered in the deep, clashing greens and reds of Cartel Polios. There was room for about a dozen back here, and seemed cramped when filled with the bulk of four Space Marines and their single prisoner. Salk glanced at the remains of his squad -Karrick's armour was charred and the purple paintwork had almost all blistered off. His helmet was gone and one side of his face was badly burned. Krin's gauntlets were smoking from the overheated plasma gun, and Nicias's armour was riddled with bullet scars. Many of Nicias's wounds were bleeding, his blood clotting almost instantly into dark red crystals.
The prisoner was slumped on the carpeted floor, motionless except for shallow breathing.
Salk turned and saw the hatchway leading into the cockpit of the shuttle. It was shut. He slung his bolter, dug his ringers into the edge of the door and ripped it clear out of its frame, metal shrieking. In the cockpit were two pilots in emerald uniforms, young and terrified, shivering with fear. They had neural jacks plugged into sockets in the backs of their shaven heads. Salk glanced at the readouts on the instrument panels in front of them - the shuttle was fuelled up and ready to go.
Salk removed his helmet, feeling sweat running down his face. The smell of gun smoke from his bolter, burned skin from Karrick and the ever-present miasma of hive city pollution, flooded his senses.
'Launch.’ he said. The two pilots paused for a second, mesmerised by the immense armoured figure that had just torn its way into the cockpit. Then they turned to the shuttle controls and, almost mechanically, began switching on the main engines and direction thrusters. The rumble of the main engines cut through the background noise of gunfire and screams.
Salk turned back into the passenger compartment. Past the closing boarding ramp he could see the crowd swirling just metres away, emaciated plague victims dragging down Cartel Polios bodyguards and the heads of the cartel themselves. Krin lined up a shot into the crowd but Salk pushed his plasma gun aside - there was no need. Within a few seconds the shuttle would be aloft. There was nothing these people could do to them now.
The boarding ramp swung shut and there was a hiss as the interior pressurised. Salk looked through to the cockpit and saw, through the frontal viewscreen, the spires of Hive Quintus burning and the smoke-laden clouds boiling up ahead.
The primary thrusters kicked in and the craft lurched forward, away from the burning nightmare of Eumenix and Hive Quintus. Salk was leaving many good Soul Drinkers in the hive city, including Captain Dreo, none of whom the Chapter could easily afford to lose. But as long as their prisoner survived and was brought off the planet, any losses were ultimately acceptable. Commander Sarpedon had made that very clear to Captain Dreo, and Salk had been compelled to carry out those same orders when Dreo was lost.
Salk returned to his squad. Karrick and Nicias both needed medical treatment and Salk had been apprenticed to the Chapter apothecarion as a novice, before he had been selected as a squad sergeant and then taken into Sarpedon's confidence after the terrible Chapter war. More importantly, the prisoner was in shock and would have to be properly looked after.
They would have to search the shuttle for supplies. It would be some time before they could expect pickup and they would have to keep the prisoner alive. But for the time being, he would have the squad enter half-sleep and take turns watching the prisoner, and settle into the routine that would keep them alive until they could return to the Chapter.
Salk didn't know the details of Sarpedon's plan. But he knew enough to guess that this mission was only the start.
SUBSECTOR THERION WAS a near-empty tract of space, notable only for the scattered asteroid fields that yielded rare minerals to the hardy prospectors who mined them. It was these prospectors who first had alerted the Imperial Navy salvage teams to the presence of something strange and truly immense that appeared without warning, as if cast randomly out of the warp.
It was huge. There were parts of it that were still recognisably Imperial warships, aquiline prows jutting from the mass of twisted metal. Smaller ships, fighters and escorts, were welded into nightmarish starbursts of jagged steel. Other parts were completely alien, with scythe-shaped hulls or bulbous organic engine pods. No one could hope to count how many spacecraft were mashed into the space hulk, only that there were craft from every era and from civilisations that could not be identified. The hulk had clearly been in the wars, and recently -there was a new scar, silver and raw, where an enormous section of the hull had been torn open as if by a giant claw. The hulk was one of the ugliest things even the Imperial salvage crews had ever seen.
Inquisitor Thaddeus agreed with them. The monstrous space hulk was huge even from his vantage point on the bridge of the Crescent Moon, where the bridge holos projected a curved viewscreen several stories high above the engine room. The wide slice of space that Thaddeus looked out on was dominated by the grey-black mass of the hulk. The light of Therion, the subsector's primary star, picked out jagged metal edges and left the corners of the hulk in pitch black shadow. A few bright slivers hovering around the hulk were Imperial Navy salvage craft, which were transmitting their comms signals to the nearby escort cruiser Obedience and then on to the Crescent Moon.
The captain of the Obedience had accepted Thaddeus as the commander of the salvage operation without having to be asked. From the logs of the first few days of the operation, it seemed seventy-four salvage engineers had boarded the space hulk so far. Thirteen had got out.