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Inferno! Volume 1 – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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INFERNO!

Volume 1

The Rat crawled over metal and between shadows. She was, she thought, moving towards death. She hoped it would be a good one. There wasn’t much else left to hope.

The Rat had fled when the gods and monsters invaded her world. She had burrowed underground, as far and as fast as she could go. Only, in truth, there was no underground, and she was not truly a rat. She was a human, doing her best to disappear into the metal embrace of the freighter Summons of Faith. The gods and monsters, though, were real. They had torn apart her conception of reality, and she had run in terror. She had become the best Rat she could be, and she was a good one, because she was still alive.

Sebastia Hoven had thought of herself as the Rat for almost twenty years now. She had come by the name honestly, and it was more than a name. It was a calling. It was also a kind of revenge. She had been born to a life aboard voidships but fated to serfdom. From her earliest childhood she had served on the lowest decks, the most insignificant menial but the fastest student. She had come to know the bodies and veins of freighters with absolute certainty. She did not think of them as extensions of her own form; rather she was a parasite, infecting a host for her own benefit. She moved through their corridors and shafts like a ghost. Her skills grew with her knowledge. She saw everything. She observed officers. With awed envy, she witnessed the power and the agency of the merchant captains who commanded the destinies of the ships and everyone aboard. In their lives, she saw what she most desired, but could never have.

But there were some things the Rat could have. Scavenger, smuggler, thief, she moved from ship to ship, rarely seen and never noticed. Her targets were modest, more important to those who bought her services than missed by her victims. It was a life that was good enough that she did not want to part with it.

She had boarded the Summons of Faith at its last port of call. It was a target of convenience. It was bound for the Skopos System, and there was a commission waiting for her there. The Summons was in the right place at the right time for her, and she had seized the chance. While aboard, she thought, she would see what her host had to offer her by way of further scavenging.

She had seen much more than she had expected. She had seen the crew. She had seen the officers, and their faces had troubled her. Their eyes had been too fervid. They did not behave like merchants. As she observed them, she had moved from puzzlement to deep anxiety and revulsion. And there were noises coming from the cargo holds. Noises she was too frightened to investigate.

Then the gods had come, fearsome in their righteousness, raining fire upon their foes and terrible to behold. She had heard stories of the Adeptus Astartes, but she had never seen them before. The colossi in blue armour marched through the corridors of the freighter like the embodiments of war itself, and the Rat wanted no part of war. She was frightened of the gods, and her first instinct had been to stay hidden from their sight as they brought it to the Summons. She feared their judgement.

She feared the monsters who had come next even more. These were monsters of beauty and grace and cruelty, monsters whose weapons flayed the flesh with storms of crystals.

She had fled. She hid. She could hide for a long time in the bowels of a voidship.

But not forever. If the monsters wanted to find her, they would. So, finally, she had decided to face the gods.

The crawlspace wasn’t even a shaft. It was a thin, winding vein formed by the gaps between giant conduits. It was the space between the lines of a schematic, a region of the ship that was not forgotten because no one except her thought of it as existing. But if the monsters decided to look for her, they would find her even here. She had faith in their terrible abilities. She had seen what they could do. They had come to the Summons of Faith with beauty and terror, elegance and cruelty. There were clearly no limits to what they were willing to do. She dared not hope there were any limits on what they could do.

The Rat felt the space through which she moved narrow. Metal brushed her hair, its caress no more than a whisper, but a whisper with the threat of millions of tonnes that would crush her to nothing if it ever moved. She thumbed her glowstick on, and its faint light pushed back the darkness. The Rat was on her stomach, on top of a coolant pipe. Above her was a ventilation conduit ten feet wide. Ahead, the two pipes drew near to each other, the space between them vanishingly small. She had travelled this way before, though. She knew that if she sucked her breath in, the width would be just enough for her to squeeze through.

The sound of the ship’s inner workings filled her ears. It was an almost-physical wall of metallic throbbing. Grace notes of escaping steam, the grind of metal and the flare of electrical sparks cut jagged slashes through the deeper rumble of the freighter’s heartbeat. The ship was wounded, bleeding from a hundred injuries, but it was not dead yet. It was still heading for Skopos.

Either the ship, or the beings aboard it, had to be stopped. She had seen enough to know that. She had seen the horrors. ‘Do this,’ she whispered to herself. ‘You have to. Do this, and earn a good death.’

That would be her greatest theft. Her greatest victory.

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A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Lie Setiawan.

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ISBN: 978-1-78030-929-3

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