Dan Abnett - Ravenor: The Omnibus

A WARHAMMER 40,000 OMNIBUS

RAVENOR

Dan Abnett

original scan by Undead

edited by fractalnoise

v1.3 (2012.01)

I T IS THE 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Y ET EVEN IN his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants and worse.

T O BE A man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

CONTENTS

RAVENOR

The great procession of the triumph passed under the Spatian Gate, and I marched with it, into the atrocity. That ceremonial arch, so splendid and massive, forms a threshold in the course of my life. I stepped across it and was remade, transmuted from one form into another.

Some have said that I was crippled beyond the measure of a man. I do not see it that way.

I believe I was liberated.

Gideon Ravenor, preface to The Mirror of Smoke

THEN

Local summer time, Southern landmass, Zenta Malhyde, 397.M41

H E WAS SLEEPING in his habitent when the cries of the indigens woke him.

Ekoh! Ekoh! Nnsa skte medu!

He sat up fast, sweat streaking down his bare torso. Hed been dreaming about the Vents of Sleef. Always the drop, the long drop into the bowels of hell

Ekoh! Hende! Nnsa skte medu!

His Cognitae-trained mind fumbled for a translation. That damned indigen argot. Ekoh that was pay heed or great news, and hende was a formal title he was fast getting used to. The rest? Nsa skt that was a verb form. Parse it, for Thrones sake finding of a thing, I find, he/she/it finds, we find

Great gods of nowhere!

He scrambled to his feet, naked, and reached for his bodyglove, which hung like a sloughed lizard skin over the back of the trestle chair. Ambient temp was already high in the forties, and the habitents viropump was struggling to breathe cool air into the unlit prefab.

The door-flap of the habitent drew back and the awful, prickling heat rushed in. Kyband came with it. His long black hair was lank with sweat, and the corners of his eyes and mouth were raw where he had taken too long to scrape out nte-fly eggs.

Get dressed, Zyg, Kyband said. Despite the weeping redness, his eyes were bright. The little bastards have cracked it.

O UTSIDE, THE SHOCKING heat made him gasp despite himself. The indigens were thronging around the camps habitents, chattering excitedly and waving their dirty fingers at the sky. Nung the ogryn had to drive them back with a lash. Kyband went to get his weapon, slapping flies away from his face.

Molotch fastened up his bodyglove. Just ten seconds in the open heat and already his sweat was pouring out inside its rubberised sheath. He set a straw hat on his head. Where? he asked. Site C, said Kyband.

It was only a ten-minute walk from the camp, but every step was an effort. Molotch quickly realised hed left his glare-shades back in the tent. His eyes began to ache and tear up in the intense sunlight. The day glare seared white against the powder rock and glinted mercilessly off the shiny, ink-black cups and tubes of the fleshy vegetation.

The indigens ran around and ahead of them, urging them along, their scrawny, tanned bodies indifferent to the frying heat.

Site C, eh? Molotch panted. And there was I putting money on D. Whod have thought it?

Not Nung, said Nung, though, in fairness, there were very few things he ever thought of all by himself.

Through one last glade of stinking black tubers and they came out into the hard shadows of the pillars. Formed of white crystal, the pillars rose as high as thirty metres, like the columns of some lost temple. Boros Dias had assured Molotch they were an entirely natural geo-form. The treacherous pathway wound between the pillars all the way down to the cliff face. Their feet particularly the bare feet of the scampering indigens kicked up sheets of white dust from the path. The clouds made Molotch and Kyband cough and spit. Nung appeared untroubled. The ogryn displayed a remarkable resilience to physical discomfort. A nte-egg infestation had swollen and necrotised the flesh of his face from behind his left ear to his eye-line, and even that didnt seem to bother him.

At site C, the servitor-excavators had dug out a whole section of the grainy white cliff-face, and Nung had personally used a flamer to torch away the last of the overhanging growth. A ragged cleft had been exposed in the facing. Two weeks worth of back-breaking labour by the indigens had cleared the cleft of rubble and revealed it.

Lynta was standing guard by the opening.

The shouting from the indigens grew louder and Molotch turned to Kyband.

This requires privacy, he said.

Kyband nodded. He pulled the bolt pistol from his belt holster and held it up. It had taken them a while to learn, but the indigens now understood what it did. They fled in terror, every last one of them, their triumphant whoops turning into hasty yelps.

The site fell silent but for the gurgle of sap, the whistle of insects and the buzzing crackle of the sun.

Lynta?

She walked over to them, mopping perspiration from her brow. Her bodyglove was set to max-chill, and rapidly thawing frost was fuming off her lean figure.

The doc says we have it at last, hende, she said.

Dont call me that. It makes you sound like a heathen.

Lynta smiled. Were all heathens, arent we, Zygmunt?

After this, Lynta, well all be gods, he replied and turned his body sideways to slide in through the narrow cleft. Zygmunt? she called out, halting him.

What?

When are you going to tell us? When are you going to tell us what it is you and the doc are after here? Me and Kyband the rest we deserve to know.

Molotch looked into her bright green eyes. They were murder-hard. He knew she was right. Purchased loyalty would only stretch so far.

Soon, he said and wriggled into the cleft. Boros Dias was twenty metres inside, in the darkness, and he was caked in dust. He was instructing two servitors about a painstaking method of excavation. Fan-units in the back of their distended necks whirred as they blew air into the crevices that Diass light-wand illuminated. There you are, said Boros Dias. What have you found?