by David Guymer
‘Aye, lord.’
The thought that Kristos might have deliberately held the Alloyed to the grinder focused his anger like a bolter to the back of the head. The Iron Father had used the Garrsak and Borrgos Clan ships rather than his own to delay the ork armada, and he suspected he knew why: lest Draevark and Tartrak combine their strength to demand their Apothecaries’ return by force. Even together, the Alloyed and the Brutus were no match for the Omnipotence. Certainly not now.
Draevark clenched his fist, the talons of his deactivated lightning claw grinding against one another as he pictured the monstrous Raukaan Clan ironbarque in his mind.
Once he returned to Clan Garrsak’s Commandment, then Kristos could expect a reckoning.
A sprawling, mental tri-D of the battle zone filled Draevark’s thoughts, a square of broken glass crammed into an ovoid vessel. It was as crabby and broken as the rest of the Alloyed’s punished systems, more often than not a boiling mess of neuralgia and static. He compartmentalised the discomfort, surrendering a portion of himself to suffer while the rest of his mind focused on drawing meaning from the static.
‘Our new heading takes us away from the planet,’ he muttered to himself.
Time enough for his small force to deploy to Sevastian’s forge sacrarium and dig in.
‘It is an intercept course for the Shield of the God-Emperor.’
Draevark glowered at nothing. He was running out of brain space in which to box away his anger.
‘Is Kristos with you? I want to speak with him.’
A feedback growl reverberated from his grille. ‘Ask him if he thinks I would be unaware that Clave Jalenghaal and the Three also approaches the Shield of the God-Emperor from the planetary side. I am iron captain of Clan Garrsak. He forgets who he is dealing with.’
Draevark turned his head and noticed that his armour’s spirit had indeed ignited the talons of his left gauntlet. They were bathed in a humming electrostatic field, tongues of energy licking from claw to claw.
Draevark blink-selected the ‘deactivate’ rune in his helmet displays, his claw hanging suddenly heavy as it powered down. ‘What will you have us do once we reach the Hospitallers barge?’
‘I will not ram a ship twice my displacement for Kristos.’
III
The cascade electrical failure that took out the Shield of the God-Emperor’s monstrous drive stacks was visually unspectacular, but undeniably effective. Drive plates that had, up until that point, been burning like the surface of the sun fell dark, bleeding off waste heat as black smoke into the void as the battle-barge’s entire aft section drifted lazily to port. Inertia continued to push the bulk of the warship on its prior heading, but it went port-side on now, slowly sacrificing forward velocity to its turn. Jalenghaal watched the vessel list in near real time, tracking it through the viewing block in the crowded troop bay of the Three.
‘Convenient,’ said Lurrgol. It was the most sensible word to have passed the warrior’s vocabuliser in days, and the rest of the clave forgot the abrupt disablement of the Hospitallers flagship for a moment to look at their brother. ‘Well, it is,’ he muttered, turning his helmeted gaze back to the block.
It was indeed convenient.
With the battle-barge’s titanic drives at full burn, the Three would never have caught up until she began her deceleration to combat speeds, by which time she would have been crawling with ork fightas and turret duels.
A sudden shift in bearing knocked the harnessed Iron Hands’ heads together. Borrg swore, his bald head already beginning to colour where it had slammed into Strontius’ helmet.
‘Wear your primarch-be-damned helmet,’ growled Thorrn.
The neophyte threw the veteran a grin that the purpling of his forehead only made more savage.
Shutting himself off from the aggression that Borrg was unconsciously dumping onto the clave interlink, toxic even split ten ways, Jalenghaal opened a link to the pilot servitor. Information rushed from source to sink, and for a fraction of a nanosecond he was the pilot servitor. He was laid out on the cockpit slab, bound with cable leeches, eyeless gaze forward as dogfighting Fury Interceptors and ork fighta-bommers jinked across the armourglass screen. Flak bloomed around the gunship, corresponding to every bump and buffet that the troop bay felt. The Shield of the God-Emperor was a monolith of toppled white stone directly ahead, growing larger and larger with every moment of travel.
In the time it took an electron to race the twenty metres between Jalenghaal’s restraint harness and the cockpit, and come back again, he had the situation update he sought.
‘Trouble?’ asked Burr.
‘No.’
The Iron Hand did not need any additional detail than that.
Another blast knocked them all about in their harnesses.
‘I wish I knew what we were doing here,’ Borrg complained. ‘I thought things would be different after leaving Clan Dorrvok.’
Lurrgol snorted, but said nothing.
He was clearly entering one of his more lucid phases.
Jalenghaal looked instinctively up, though the voice was inside his head.
The primary command tethers installed into every new recruit to Clan Garrsak’s suit-brain interface were generally reserved for high-level clan functions. Jalenghaal wondered where the magos calculi obtained the authorities to access them.
Jalenghaal summoned the simulus file he had inloaded from Iron Father Kristos. The keel of most Imperial warships was laid down to standard template patterns and, paintwork and serial numbers aside, they were essentially identical. Internally however, the character of the Adeptus Astartes Chapters showed through. The Shield of the God-Emperor’s bridge was vast, with a crew of thousands, and distant sons though they were, the Hospitallers were still scions of Dorn – their command centre would be a fortress. He quadruple-checked the melta bombs and haywire grenades studding the magnetic bandolier that crossed his chest plastron. It was a long way from his standard loadout.
‘Compliance.’
‘How will we bypass their shields?’
Jalenghaal processed that for a moment.
Thinking back to the sight of Kristos’ first sergeant, Telarrch, laid out on the bridge of the Isha’s Spear under a stasis field, Jalenghaal knew exactly the reason.
He replied, ‘No.’
‘I have no ambition.’
He thought he heard a chuckle resonating between his ears.
Deception did not come naturally to an Iron Hand, at least not to this one, tenth sergeant of the Second Clan Company. It was contrary to the order of the schema. Despite Jalenghaal’s best efforts to codewall himself against Borrg’s febrile mood, some of his disquiet must have filtered through the interlink, because Lurrgol suddenly stirred.
‘Never dilute your strength by fighting alongside another,’ he said, sounding oddly wistful. ‘You alone are strong.’
‘When did you begin reciting the Scriptorum of Iron?’ asked Burr.
Lurrgol turned to Jalenghaal, zero recognition in his helmet lenses as he gave his sergeant a nod. ‘When Stronos became our sergeant.’
IV
Macro impacts blistered the Alloyed’s port shields. The effect of dumping all that kinetic energy onto the immaterium was a kaleidoscope of hellishly distorted colours that infected the oculus screen, and a piercing whine that Draevark dialled out but which clearly discomforted the mortal serfs enormously. They knew better than to let it impair their work.
From what Draevark could prise from the Alloyed’s intransigent tri-D mapping, the battle for Fabris Callivant’s orbit went well.
The orks had bloodied their foreheads on Battlefleet Dimmamar, but its ships held firm, only now disengaging under covering fire from the heavier line ships of Warfleet Obscurus. Fresh vessels of Battlefleet Trojan and a few Basilikon Astra squadrons plugged the gaps. Their bulk and firepower alone were enough to keep anything larger than an attack ship breaking through, while a handful of incision boarding actions from the newly returned Hospitallers warships granted some relief from the pressure.
The great bulwark against the ork wave, however, was the Darkward star fort.
The Dark Age bastion was inviolate. Its shields were massive. Even the Omnipotence would struggle to strip a single layer from its interplex void arrays before its graviton pulsars and conversion lancers carved the great ironbarque apart. In that wonderfully predictable way the orks had when presented with an alpha opponent, the greenskins were unleashing everything they possessed at it. Bloated battleships and ram-fronted destroyers alike disintegrated on its defences. Battlefleet Callivant had little to do but snuff out the occasional orphan fighta and hurl torpedo salvo after salvo into the mad scrum of ships.
Draevark looked up as a sudden vibration rattled the debris over his bridge. He felt a mild disorientation, as if his weight had been temporarily drawn to an angle ever so slightly off one hundred and eighty degrees, before the Alloyed’s artificial gravitics compensated for the effect.
‘Report.’
‘I think you need to see this yourself, lord,’ said the hook-fisted serf who Draevark was devoting serious thought to naming shipmaster.
Draevark’s mindlink to the Alloyed’s auspectoriae was becoming lagged by battle damage and her spirit’s upset, so he clumped towards the serf’s station. He interpreted the gravimetric parabola and its accompanying runescreed in the time it would have taken a mortal to blink an eye. In the few, jealously guarded places where he remained warm, he ran cold.
‘Patch through to starboard viewers and magnify.’
The oculus dissolved into static, fizzing back to life after an inordinate number of seconds to present an image stolen from the ship’s starboard vid-captors. A single shape dominated the oval screen. A dark lump. Pinprick lights lit it, and at first Draevark assumed them to be guide lights for attack craft, but then he noticed the magnification bar at the base of the display and readjusted the scale of his thinking. They were explosions, every one an ork warship being rammed and carelessly obliterated as the object drove through the heart of the ork fleet towards Trojan’s line of battle.
‘How far away is it?’
‘Blood of Manus, it’s an asteroid,’ said the shocked serf.
Draevark regarded the man a moment, then smashed his face into the runebank, demolishing the mortal’s skull and spraying its contents down the sloping console and over the iron captain’s greaves.
‘How far away is it?’ he repeated
A temporary silence held sway over the bridge before another serf found the personal courage to step forwards.
He was young. Most were young, the mortality rate aboard Draevark’s ship saw to that, but he looked barely nineteen or twenty. An old burn whorled one side of his face. The eye was pinched shut and blind. His plain black uniform was tattered and several exterior rods held his arm to his shoulder, but otherwise he was remarkably whole for an adult Medusan.
‘Fifteen minutes from Battlefleet Trojan,’ he said.
‘Can it be destroyed?’
The new shipmaster-elect consulted a dozen stations, taking reports from his former peers. ‘It’s fifteen hundred kilometres across at its narrowest point, massing at almost five trillion tonnes.’
Draevark grunted. It was about the same size as Thennos, Medusa’s rad-bitten ninth planet. Even the Golden Ratio’s nova cannon would not make a dent in that.
‘It’s heading straight for the Darkward.’
Even as the serf made the announcement, lights began to flash indicating a barrage of urgent hails, vox-servitors babbling like mediums hosting a sudden influx of the unseen.
Draevark felt the creeping stitch of a smile somewhere beneath what he thought of as his face. Evidently sharing his amusement at the lesser vessels’ panic, the Alloyed’s neurolithic relay stabilised the tri-D sufficiently for him to see the effect that the ork asteroid’s appearance had had on the fleet. Ships scattered from its path, line discipline disappearing like dust dunes before a gale. For their part, the orks gave scant heed to the planetary body moving through their armada, taking advantage of the breaks in formation to plunge their ships through the Imperial lines. Some made it close enough to Fabris Callivant to vomit drop pods over the thermosphere. Dogfights criss-crossed the upper atmosphere as House Callivant’s sub-orbital aeronautica were scrambled.
Only the Darkward held resolute. If movement had ever been among its vast suite of powers then the knowledge of how to invoke it had been lost before the rise of the Emperor.
Gravitic strikes. Dark energy lances. Vortex drivers. Magma Annihilators. With a suite of weaponry almost unknown to Imperial artifice and conventional ordnance enough to boil the crust from a small moon, the star fort poured its firepower into the ork asteroid. But destroying a planet was no simple task: even an Iron Hand, resolved to the extermination of a population, generally fell short of the rock beneath their feet. Bands of metallic dust and lumps of regolith, some of the larger bodies with teetering orkish structures still attached and returning fire, clung to the asteroid’s gravity field as it soaked up everything that the Darkward could put out.
The pummelling at least slowed it by fourteen centimetres per second, delaying the inevitable by approximately six minutes.
Draevark saw the Hospitallers’ eight remaining warships altering course, coming about to engage the asteroid. As anyone familiar with their way of war might have predicted.
The Shield of the God-Emperor became more and more isolated as he watched, a screen of increasingly disarrayed Imperial ships falling between it and its brothers. In a minute or two, the Alloyed would be the closest ship to it.
Qarismi had predicted this. He had predicted it and let it happen.
The Imperium and its forces were more usefully regarded as assets than allies, but expending them in so senseless a fashion still sat poorly with Draevark.
‘Why would I?’ Draevark growled.
‘Offer them…’
Then Draevark understood.
Through his interlink tethers he
could sense Jalenghaal’s clave, a cluster of bright sparks in a noospheric void. Space in the hemisphere of Fabris Callivant was hardly dark, but tendrils of communication and data linkage were spread thin over the cosmic distances, a web spun by an electronic spider the size of a moon.
Kristos meant to board the Shield of the God-Emperor.
And he knew why. The same reason he had stolen Draevark’s Apothecary.
He could almost admire Kristos’ thinking, but once again, the Iron Father forgot who he was dealing with.
Draevark gave a snarl. Kristos would pay for his trespasses against the Garrsak Clan, and dearly, but Draevark was an Iron Hand; he could afford to be patient. The moment for reprisal would arise, in time.
‘Compliance.’
V
Rauth maintained a bitter flow of invective as Khrysaar kept him moving. He limped on his mauled foot. Every pull on torn muscle drew a gasp. His shoulder, where his use of his brother as a crutch forced their skin to touch, felt as though it were daubed in some corrosive substance. Think of him as an emergency bionic. He gritted his teeth. Endure it.
The street they hurried down was empty.
A full-scale military lockdown had sealed everyone inside their hab blocks or, if their position entitled them, one of the apocalypse shelters buried in the deep bowels of the underhive. Only the occasional armed patrol passed this way, and even they were beginning to wind down as forces withdrew to more critical areas. Ground war loomed.
Nevertheless they kept to the companionways. The jettied upper storeys shielded them from the rain. The power to the worker habs and street lumens had been cut, to darken Fort Callivant to ork bommers as much as possible. A generous assumption on the part of Princeps Callivant’s strategos that ork bommer pilots aim. More than once, the age-darkened splash barriers proved proof against unwelcome attention as convoys of armoured vehicles in the colour markings of the Mordian XXIV rumbled down the rain-slicked highway. They didn’t slow on their way through.
