by Dan Abnett
These devices were heavier than normal. The body-shells were armoured against hard vacuum and heavy fire. The legs were more robust, and ended in flexible grab-claws. These things were designed to walk in the cold silence of the void, to scurry across the surface of starships, to find purchase as they sought to bite or cut a way inside. They were built to live like lice or ticks on the hull-skin of a shiftship.
The underslung gunpods were firing, the gyro-mounts turning each recoil slap into a fluid bounce. Deck plates erupted. Part of the chamber wall blew out in a dizzy gout of flame and sparks. One of the fueling wagons was blown to pieces.
An iron wheel squealed as it rolled across the deck.
Enemy foot soldiers, their visor slits glowing, advanced behind the stalk-tanks, firing as they came. Ezra felt a laugh building in his throat. He had survived the one-sided war by sticking to the hit-and-run resistance tactics of the Nihtgane. Stalk, kill, move, stay invisible. His situation was now beyond impossible.
Ezra knelt and took aim. He was partially shielded by the burning remains of a service crate. He aimed for the small, armoured window port on the nearest stalk-tank, and wondered if he could hit it. He was pretty confident he could. But could he penetrate it? Even if he poured on all the power left in the cell?
Yes. Yes, he could. He would kill it. It would be his last act as part of the Ghost regiment.
Ezra pulled the trigger. The gun did not fire. The rune was red. Power out.
Ezra allowed himself to laugh.
‘Is there any way of getting an external visual?’ Gaunt asked.
‘Are you commanding this ship now?’ Kelvedon snapped back.
‘Be silent, Kelvedon,’ Darulin commanded.
They had descended to the main tactical strategium, a broad projector well in the forward section of the bridge. Kelvedon was back on his feet, though his face was flushed. Other bridge seniors had followed them. Gaunt was surrounded by towering robed men who were only marginally organic, and angry, blue-uniformed command echelon officers. He was entirely out of place. This was not his kind of war, nor his area of expertise. He was Guard. Battlefleet and Astra Militarum, they were ancient rivals in glory, with entirely different mindsets. They always had been, since mankind first left the cradle of Terra and set out across the stars. One branch of humanity conquered worlds, the other conquered the void. They were allies, brothers… closer than that, perhaps. But they had never been friends. Their philosophies were too different. For a start, each one presumed that the other depended upon them.
But Gaunt put himself in the middle of it all. There were two reasons for that. The first was that all their lives were at stake and he was hardly going to sit idly by and let the battlefleet officers determine his regiment’s fate.
The second was that he had a sense of things. He had a sense of command. The thread of authority was the same in the Navy as it was in the Guard, and his years of service had left him with an instinct for it. The Armaduke was lost. It had lost its spirit. Spika was dead, and the confusion Gaunt had discovered on the bridge when he arrived was profound. These were high-functioning officers. They were brilliant and mentally agile. They should not have been frozen in shock and incapable of decision. They should not have been gazing down at the corpse of their commander wondering what to do next.
They should not have needed a scruffy Guard commander to push his way in and administer futile chest compressions.
They were lost. Gaunt didn’t know why. He felt sure it was less to do with Spika’s death, and much more to do with the shredding violence and incomprehensible time-loss of their retranslation. The Armaduke was crippled, and its crew – linked to it in too many subtle and empathic ways to count – was crippled too.
Someone had to take the lead. Someone had to ignite some confidence. And that someone wasn’t Kelvedon, who saw only his own career path.
Gaunt remembered his time on the escort frigate Navarre, right at the start of his service with the Ghosts. There had been an executive officer, Kreff, who had been sympathetic. Most of what Gaunt understood about the battlefleet he had learned from Kreff.
The scions of the battlefleet, they were just men even if they didn’t look like men. And men were the same the universe over.
‘We need to get out of this,’ Gaunt said. He started speaking generally, casually. That was the first thing you did; you brought everybody in and acknowledged them. He hated to be so clinical, but there was no choice.
‘Can we light the strategium display?’ he added. Casual, just a side comment. Confidence.
The hololithic well started to light up around them. Hardlight forms and numeric displays painted their faces and their clothes.
‘I’m going to get my troopers ready,’ he said, still casual. ‘They’re going to protect this ship. They’re going to fight off anything that tries to get inside. I’ll welcome the support of your armsmen too.’
Be inclusive. That was the next step. Breed a sense of common action and respect. Now it was time for truth.
‘You’re hurt, and you’re dismayed. There’s no shame in that. What has overtaken us is terrible and it has hurt you all. But the ship is you, and you are the ship. It will not live without you. Spika loved this old girl. He would have wanted her to see out her days in safe hands.’
Gaunt looked at Darulin.
‘Externals?’
‘Processing now, sir,’ said the acting shipmaster.
‘How badly hurt are we?’ Gaunt asked. He aimed the question softly and generally.
The cowled Master of Artifice, flanked by his functionaries, sighed.
‘No drive. No main serial power. No secondary power. No shields. No weapon commit. No navigation. No sensory auspex. No scope. No intervox. No real space stability. Massive and serial gravitic disruption.’
‘I’m not Fleet,’ Gaunt said. ‘I take it that’s not a good list?’
The Master of Artifice actually smiled.
‘It is not, sir.’
‘Then enumerate the positives for me.’
The Master of Artifice hesitated. He glanced at Darulin and his subordinates.
‘Well… I suppose… we have environmental stability and general pressure integrity. Life support. Gravitics have resumed. We are running on tertiary batteries, which gives us six weeks real time, permitting use. We… we are alive.’
Now Gaunt smiled.
‘That, sir,’ he said, ‘is the basis for most Imperial Guard fightbacks. We’re alive. Thank the Throne. I never wanted to live forever, but a little while longer would be appreciated.’
‘Ten years longer,’ said Criid.
A grim ripple of laughter drifted around the strategium.
‘External view?’ Gaunt asked.
Darulin nodded and waved an actuation wand. The well filled with a massive data-projection map of the Armaduke. It presented nose-down like a drowning whale. Gaunt rubbed his mouth. He realised he’d honestly never known what the outside of the ship looked like. He was looking at something that had been the limits of his world for weeks.
He had known it was vast. He hadn’t realised how vast. The Armaduke was a massive structure, and now it was a helpless massive structure.
‘What are those?’ Gaunt asked, pointing to three blob structures visualised at the aft of the ship’s mass.
‘Enemy craft,’ replied Darulin. ‘Light warp vessels of a much smaller tonnage than us. They have secured themselves to us to facilitate boarding.’
‘Do they have a mother ship?’ asked Gaunt.
Darulin dialled the strategium view back with his wand. The Armaduke shrank rapidly. The revised view showed another vessel sitting off them at a distance of seventeen thousand kilometres. It was large, a cruiser perhaps.
‘Yes, there,’ said Darulin. ‘An Archenemy starship. No standard pattern discernible. A destroyer, I would imagine. Fast, agile, well armed.’
‘And it’s not firing on us because?’ Gaunt asked.
‘They want us as s
crap. As prisoners, as raw materials,’ said Criid. ‘They want to pick our bones.’
Gaunt looked at her.
‘I supposed so,’ he said to her. ‘I was hoping the acting shipmaster here might admit it.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ said Criid.
‘Sorry,’ said Darulin. ‘That is… that is exactly what they’re doing.’
SEVEN: THE LINE
Ezra was still laughing at his own doom when fury burst into the compartment. The slap of the shock wave threw him onto his side. The air filled with billowing smoke.
Huge figures emerged out of it.
Sar Af, the White Scar. Holofurnace, the Iron Snake. Eadwine, the Silver Guard. Full armour. Full weapons.
Three warriors alone against the mass of raiders flooding the vast compartment.
‘Kill them all,’ Eadwine said, a growl of sub-vox.
The Archenemy troopers, dazed and dismayed by the breaching blast, began firing. Las-bolts and hard-rounds pinged and slapped off the armoured Adeptus Astartes. In unison, they raised their bolt weapons and returned fire.
Bolter shots mowed down two rows of Archenemy foot troops. Explosive horror threw shredded meat and debris into the air. The enemy mass reeled back, recoiling as its leading edge was blown apart.
Ezra watched in disbelief as the three Space Marines charged the bulk of the foe. As they met the line, the impact threw bodies into the air. Eadwine’s chainsword flashed, roaring. Archenemy troopers collapsed like harvested corn, their armoured bodies torn apart. Particles of flesh, blood, tissue and metal showered out of the carnage. A wet red fog began to cloud the burning air.
To Eadwine’s left, Holofurnace hacked his way through the shrieking raiders. They were turning on each other, frantically fighting to get out of the giant’s path. The Iron Snake reached a stalk-tank and split open its belly with his lance. Fluid, blood and toxic water spewed out of the sliced control bubble. Holofurnace stabbed the tip of his lance inside the wreck to impale the huddled body of the hard-wired pilot.
Another tank began firing, auto-tracking its target. Holofurnace was jarred back by the scorching impacts, but remained on his feet and hurled his lance like a javelin. Impaled through its core, the stalk-tank shivered, spasmed and collapsed, venting bio-fluid.
Holofurnace wrenched his lance out. Fluid spattered.
‘For the Emperor!’ he yelled.
At Eadwine’s right hand, Sar Af pounced and landed on the back of another stalk-tank. It thrashed under his weight. He punched through the top of the main body to haul the driver out, and hurled the writhing body aside as he threw himself off the collapsing machine. Milling foot troops broke his fall. He killed them with his fists as they tried to scramble out from underneath him. More fled. Sar Af howled and followed them, cutting them down with his bolter.
Eadwine was murdering the foot troops too. Chainsword in one fist, storm bolter in the other, he was simply striding into the fumbling lines of the raiders like a man walking determinedly into a brisk gale, head down and unstoppable. Sparks flashed as hard munitions pinged and glanced off his armoured mass. He fired, selectively and methodically, toppling groups at a time, slashing into any bodies that came too close as though cutting back undergrowth.
Ezra left cover and cautiously followed in their wake. The Adeptus Astartes giants had cut a swathe down the engine house, littering the broad deck with burning wreckage and tangled corpses. The deck was awash with blood.
Ezra crouched, and pulled a lasgun from the dead grip of a fallen enemy. This time, he took spare clips too.
It was time to stop dying. It was time to win back the ship.
Ornella Zhukova led a portion of Pasha’s company along the ventral tunnel that approached the engine compartments from the bow of the ship. She could hear the rattle and boom of fighting from the chambers ahead, and she could smell burn-smoke. Every few seconds, the deck shook.
Everything had a glassy feel, a slightly out-of-focus softness. She didn’t know if that was the smoke getting in her eyes or her own mind. Something had happened. An accident. Something distressing that involved the physics and processes of shiftship travel, and it made her feel sick.
The company had been prepping for secondary orders. Then everything had gone to hell. Had they been hit, or was it something worse than that? She’d woken with a grinding headache, and many of her troopers had been sick, or complained of nausea or nosebleeds.
‘Vox?’ she hissed.
‘Nothing!’ the caster-man replied. Wall-mounted units wheezed nothing but static, and the squad’s voxcasters coughed and crackled.
‘Keep it tight!’ she ordered. The men were in disarray. Confusion did that, confusion and fear. They didn’t know the situation, and they didn’t know what they were facing. Worse, they had so little ammo. There had been no time to send carts down to the munition stocks, and even if there had been, Zhukova knew the racks were almost bare.
The regiment was in no position to fight another war.
One of her scouts appeared from a transverse duct and hurried to her.
‘Spetnin?’ she asked.
‘In lateral two, advancing, ma’am,’ the scout replied. He looked out of breath. His face was filmy with soot and grease. Spetnin had taken half the company to shadow Zhukova’s mob along the parallel hallway in the hope that, between them, they could block any forward movement along the aft thoroughfares. That’s if they’d remembered the deck plans right. Zhukova’s head hurt so much, she could barely remember her own birthday.
‘What does he report?’ she asked.
The scout shrugged.
‘A shrug is not an answer,’ she snapped.
‘Same as here,’ the scout replied, wary of her famous anger. ‘Fighting ahead.’
The hallway had been damaged by frame stress. Wiring in the walls was shorting out and crackling with white sparks that floated like snowflakes onto the deck. Oil dripped from the ceiling and dribbled from ruptured pipes. Some of the deck’s grav plates had worked loose or become misaligned, and they shifted uneasily underfoot, like boards floating on a lake. In one section, an entire twenty-metre portion of deck plate had broken away and slammed flat against the ceiling, held there by its own, unsecured antigravity systems. The exposed underdeck was a mass of wires and stanchions, and cables trailed from overhead like vines. Blood dripped down. Someone had been standing on the plate when it had snapped free, and had been sandwiched against the roof by six tons of rapidly elevating metal.
The blood was the first sign Zhukova had seen of any of the ship’s crew.
Up ahead, Trooper Blexin raised a hand. He had stopped. She knew that tilt of the head. He’d heard something.
She was about to say his name. Blexin buckled and fell, sprays of blood gouting from his back as shots tore through him. Gunfire cut down the three men with him.
The company hit the walls, scrambling into cover behind bulkheads and hatch frames. Shots whined past. Zhukova hoisted her carbine, leaned out and snapped off return fire. Some of the men around her did the same. They had no idea what they were shooting at, but it felt good to retaliate.
The gunfire coming at them fell away.
‘Hold! Hold it!’ Zhukova shouted. ‘No wastage!’
She risked a step forwards, keeping to the wall. The first squad followed her, shuffling down the hallway, hunched, their rifles to their shoulders, tracking.
She edged past the bodies of Blexin and his mates. The deck plates quivered restlessly. She took another step. There was a sharp pistol-shot bang, and one of the plate’s restraining pins sheared. A corner of the plate lifted from the underfloor, flexing, straining, like a tent sheet caught by the wind, wanting to snap its guy wires and fly away.
Zhukova swallowed hard. Sliding her feet rather than stepping, she worked along the trembling plate. She guessed three or maybe four heavy duty pins were all that were keeping the damaged section down, all that stood between her and a grotesque fate squashed like a bug against the ceiling.
She stepped onto the next deck plate. It was firmer. Gorin, Velter and Urnos followed her. She could smell the garlic sausage stink of Urnos’ fear-sweat.
A shape moved in the drifting smoke ahead of her. She saw the enemy. Some robed heathen monster with a slit for eyes.
‘Hostile!’ she yelled, and snapped off two shots. The enemy trooper caught them both in the chest and slammed backwards. Answering gunfire raked out of the smoke, hard-round shots that swirled the smoke into plumes and weird spirals. She hit the wall, willing it to swallow her up. A bullet ripped open the musette bag on her hip. Velter went down, head shot, and Gorin toppled backwards, hit in the shoulder and chest. Urnos dropped on his belly and started to fire and yell.
The angle of the enemy fusillade altered, raking the deck, trying to hit Gorin and the yelling Urnos. Zhukova saw plating buckle. She saw the edge of the damaged plate she’d slid across taking hits.
‘Back! Back! Back!’ she yelled at the rest of the company behind her.
A deck pin blew out. No longer able to anchor the restless plate, the other pins sheared explosively under the strain. Unstable gravitics slammed the loosed deck plate into the ceiling like a flying carpet. It fell up the way a boulder falls down. There was a terrible, crunching impact. Zhukova had no idea how many of her trailing first squad had been standing on it when it broke free. All she saw was Gorin, who had been sprawled on his back across the join. The plate swept him up like a hoist and crushed him against the roof, crushed his head, arms and upper body. His legs, dangling clear, remained intact and hung, impossibly, like a pair of breeches strung from a washing line.
Dust and flames billowed along the tunnel. The firing stopped for a moment. Zhukova grabbed Urnos and hauled him up to the wall. She couldn’t see any part of her company in the tunnel behind her. All she could see was Gorin’s heavy, slowly swinging legs.
