Dan Abnett - Salvations Reach

ONE

Suicide Kings

Something, perhaps the year of living by the skin of his teeth on occupied Gereon, or merely the fact of having been born a sly and ruthless son of a bitch, had given Major Rawne of the Tanith First a certain edge.

He could usually smell trouble coming. That morning, he could definitely smell trouble coming. As edges went, his was as fine and sharp as the one along the blade of his straight silver warknife.

At dawn, with the twin suns beginning to burn up through the petrochemical smog across the city bay, he left the regimental billet and walked down to the rockcrete wasteland of the bayside revetment. There, he wandered as far as the bridge, and crossed over to the pontoons in front of the island guardhouse.

The pontoon walkway clunked underfoot. Looking down through the mesh, he could see the water, toxic brown and frothy. The massive galvanic plants along the bay, Adeptus Mechanicus developments that powered and lit the hive citys core systems, had just flushed their heatsinks, and filled the coastline with its morning dose of radioactive effluent. There was steam in the air, steam that stank of sulphur and rolled like a fog bank, white in the suns light. The waters of the bay and estuary had been corrosively acidic for a thousand years. It was sobering to think that anything still lived in it.

But things did. Just below the surface, they squirmed and moved, leech-mouthed, slug-slick, with dentition like crowded pincushions and eyes like phlegm. Rawne could see them, following him beneath the surface ; a dark, wriggling mass. What gave them their edge? Was it the sound of his footsteps, the passing heat signature of his body? Pheromones? His shadow on the water?

They were survivors. They had adapted to their environment instead of allowing it to kill them. And they killed anything that threatened them.

Just like him.

Three Urdeshi troopers were manning the guardhouse. They didnt know him, and he didnt know them. They werent his concern. He had chosen that particular morning because it was pretty much the last chance he was going to get before the regiment shipped out. The point of no turning back had been reached.

But still, there was the nagging discomfort of his edge. Something was off. Something was wrong. Hed chosen the wrong day to try it. Maybe the troopers suspected him of something, maybe they were wired up for some reason. Maybe something had given away his true intent.

Under ordinary circumstances, the doubt would have been enough to make him abort, turn around, and go home. The uncertainty would have been sufficient to make him blow it off and try again another day when the odds were more favourable.

Except there werent going to be any more other days . It was now, or it was never. There were no more chances. The monster, that monster , should have been dead long since. Justice and decency demanded it, and only the dedicated efforts of good men who ought to have known better were ensuring the monsters salvation.

Dedication. Rawne had always possessed a measure of dedication. He knew what was right and what was wrong. He knew when an order was a bad thing and needed to be ignored. He knew that sometimes a man had to be counter-intuitive. A man had to do what looked like a bad thing so that everything else would be right in the end.