Sun never gets to say what they are doing, because his next words are stolen by Axhon-Pho’s mechanical voice blaring all around them. Over the emitters, and the vox.
A second distant tremor rattles the gantry and Raine catches one last shouted word over the vox-link through a roar of static and screams that sends her cold to her core.
Decompression.
‘No,’ says Kayd.
‘Gold, do you read me?’ Hale says. ‘Gold, acknowledge!’
Hale slams his fist on the deck.
‘Gold!’ he says, again.
But there is no answer from Karin Sun. Instead, the voice that breaks the static belongs to Sale Devri.
‘Kar is gone,’ Devri says. The hurt in his voice is plain to hear.
Hale blinks. Raine sees hurt in him too, just for an instant, before he buries it.
‘You have to blind it,’ Hale says. ‘And quickly.’
‘I’ll cut out the bastard’s eyes,’ Devri says. ‘Just get yourself to the core and send the magos screaming to the hells.’
‘By fire and thunder,’ Hale says.
‘Aye,’ Devri replies, with a darkness in his voice. ‘By fire and thunder.’
Daven Wyck’s hands are slick with blood.
His heart hammers in his ears as he throws himself into another fight and into another squad of Sighted soldiers that are holding the bulkhead door leading to the next section of the void-gantry. Wyck drops the first with a flurry of las-fire, and the second with the butt of the gun, breaking the Sighted’s fate-marked face open to the air. More blood. Around him, his Wyldfolk are fighting too. To Wyck, it all looks to be happening slowly. In between heartbeats. Deafening, painful heartbeats. Crys has one of the Sighted on the ground, her big hands around the soldier’s neck. Jey and Haro are back to back, rifles up. Awd fires his flamer, making what’s left of the enemy fall back. Second-hand heat rolls over Wyck, bringing with it the smell of burning.
Like Cawter.
Like Keller and others.
The memory makes him falter for what feels like forever, but can only really be a second or two.
It’s still long enough to get shot.
The shotgun blast impacts against Wyck’s flak armour and knocks the air clean out of his lungs. The Sighted who shot him is grinning. His eyes are crystals, and his own chest-plate is a silver mirror. The Sighted pumps the combat shotgun and goes to fire again, but Wyck isn’t faltering anymore. He is furious. He snaps his own rifle up and fires as he moves. The first shot knocks the Sighted’s aim out, so the shotgun blast puts dents in the deck to Wyck’s left instead of taking his head off. Wyck’s second las-bolt sends the Sighted’s black blood up the armourglass behind him, and then Wyck is too close for the rifle at all. He lets it swing by the strap and slams the Sighted into the armourglass and buries his knife up and under that mirrored chest-plate. Twists it.
‘The darkness waits for you,’ the Sighted hisses, as he dies. ‘It hungers.’
Wyck recoils from the Sighted, letting him fall to the deck. He is dimly aware that the fighting around him has stopped, but the Sighted’s words have him frozen.
The darkness waits for you.
Wyck is suddenly even more aware of the void pressing in on the gantries. Of the endless, shapeless, frozen nothing waiting on the other side of the armourglass.
The darkness waits for you.
He thinks of the howling of the hounds, and the After, even more infinite than the void.
His heartbeat becomes faster. More painful.
He can’t breathe.
‘Dav, we’ve got company!’
Awd’s words filter through the rushing in Wyck’s ears and the thunder of his heart, and he turns away from the armourglass to see the bulkhead door the Sighted were guarding grinding upwards. A clade of ten skitarii stride through, painted in the enemy’s colours. They move with a killer’s grace on slender, backwards-jointed metal legs. Red lenses glow balefully in their domed face-plates, and their powered blades sing a dirge as they raise them.
‘Emperor’s wounds!’ Crys shouts. ‘They are infiltrators!’
Wyck is about to ask what in the hells that means when he is all but knocked from his feet by a blaring, agonising wall of noise. Everyone around Wyck collapses to their knees. The only reason Wyck doesn’t fall too is because the stimms won’t let him. That double dose he took keeps him upright. Instinct makes him put himself between the infiltrators and his Wyldfolk. Wyck’s eyes are streaming and his limbs want to lock, but he still manages to raise his rifle and fire. The burst of las-rounds hits one of the infiltrators right at the heart of the spiral painted on its face-plate, sending sparks and black fluid into the air. There’s a momentary gap in that damned awful wailing.
‘Get up!’ Wyck shouts to his squad.
His Wyldfolk start moving, but they are so slow. Wyck’s vision swims from that noise the infiltrators are making. He tastes blood. Tastes ozone from the crackling edges of the powered blades as one of the infiltrators lunges for him. Wyck has to roll badly to duck the skitarii’s powered blade. It hits the deck instead and cuts a furrow straight through it. Wyck gets to his feet and empties half of his lasgun cell into the infiltrator’s torso before burying his knife right between its eye-lenses. The blade goes in up to the hilt and sticks, but the infiltrator doesn’t fall. Instead the skitarii’s arm snaps out like a misfire, knocking Wyck off his feet. He loses his grip on his rifle and crashes against the wall and slides down it, struggling to breathe. Then the infiltrator turns and points its stubcarbine at Haro. The void-born is still trying and failing to get up.
‘Haro!’ Wyck shouts, dragging himself to his feet. ‘Move!’
She doesn’t, but Awd does, with a yell. He turns his flamer on the infiltrator and washes it with promethium. The clinging fire burns away the robes and what little is left of the man it was made from, then the infiltrator’s stubcarbine detonates like a set charge, making a twisted wreck of its arm. But the damned thing still doesn’t die. It turns fast, cutting Awd across the chest with its powered blade. He cries out and goes over.
And something inside Wyck snaps.
He throws himself at the smouldering, spasming machine creature and manages to knock it flat. Manages to pull his knife from where he left it, though it makes his arm scream to do it. Makes him scream too. He buries the blade in it three more times. On the third strike the knife snaps off inside, so he sets to pulling the cables free with his bare hands until all the thing can do is twitch.
Until he realises how quiet it is, save for the ringing in his ears and the beating of his heart.
None of the infiltrators are blaring noise at them anymore, because they are all crumpled and collapsed around him, patterned with frost.
Wyck looks up to see Zane standing there with blood running in a thick stripe from her nose. It drips in half-time onto the front of her robes. The commissar is with her. Everyone is with her. All looking at him.
No. Not everyone.
Wyck gets to his feet and goes straight to where Awd is lying. The powered blade opened him up across his chest. The flak didn’t come close to stopping it. Awd is breathing like a panicked animal and pumping blood all over the floor.
‘Dav,’ he says, between shallow breaths. ‘It’s bad. It’s really bad.’
Wyck doesn’t need telling. He shouts for Lye, but she’s already dropping to her knees opposite him and pulling her kit and her needles.
‘Hey,’ Wyck says, and he clicks his fingers to get Awd’s attention. ‘Look at me. Keep your eyes open.’
Awd does as he’s told, but his eyes are foggy. Lye is trying to stop the bleeding. She’s red to her elbows, and she has that look on her face that Wyck’s seen before.
The look that tells him it’s worse than bad
.
‘I promised I’d do it,’ Awd says. ‘That I’d mind them.’
‘There’s minding, and then there’s being stupid,’ Wyck says. ‘Throne, that was stupid.’
Awd laughs, though it’s not a joke. Some blood comes with it. ‘Never promised anything about that,’ he says.
Awd takes a breath and Wyck sees the way air bubbles in the wound.
‘I’m sorry, Dav,’ Awd says.
‘What for?’ Wyck asks.
But Awd doesn’t answer. Instead, he just seizes and rasps a breath and then goes still. Wyck curls his hands into fists. It hurts to do it, because he’s cut across the palms and the knuckles from killing the infiltrator. Skinned. Ragged.
It doesn’t stop him from slamming his fist onto the deck and cutting it all over again.
‘Dav,’ Lye says.
‘Not a word,’ he snarls.
He gets to his feet and goes to fetch his rifle. Wyck sees Haro and Jey looking at him. Crys too. The great big fool has tears running down her face. She opens her mouth to say something, but he turns away because he doesn’t want to hear it from her either.
Not a damned word.
It takes almost four hours for Raine and the Antari to reach the end of the void-gantries.
Almost four hours, and a great deal of blood.
Raine’s body aches from cuts and bruises and from every fight before this one. Every blow she parries with her sword makes her ache all the worse, but still she does not stop. She cannot stop. So Raine refuses the pain and the exhaustion as she fights her way through the Sighted defending the last section of the void-gantries. Raine opens one of the Sighted from hip to throat with her sabre, letting her momentum lend strength to the blow, before using that same momentum to slip past another as he tries to cut her in turn. This one is clad in blue carapace armour and a mirrored helm and wields a wave-bladed sword made from dark metal. Raine hears the hum of the sword as it parts the air by her head.
‘Change is creation,’ the Sighted says, as he swings for her again. ‘Change is death.’
Raine catches his sword on her own, and pushes the Sighted back a step. He hisses behind his mirrored mask.
‘And so is death creation,’ he says. ‘Only by–’
The Sighted’s last word is lost to the boom of Raine’s bolt pistol. The explosive round shatters the man’s helm and his head beneath it and his body falls heavily onto the decking, gouting black blood. Around Raine, the fight is in full flow. Another of the Sighted cuts Yuri Hale and nearly takes that same eye he was so lucky not to lose. Hale answers with las-fire from his pistol that paints the deck with blood like a starfield. Lydia Zane slams one of the heretics against the armourglass and breaks him. Tyl and Jeth make quick, efficient kills, dropping many of their enemies before they can even close range. Raine sees Wyck snap the neck of another Sighted with a twist of his hands, shouting as he does it. Raine draws her sword through another of them. Through the last of them. The heretic falls hard and rasps a noisy breath, and then dies.
‘And now for the door,’ Hale says from beside her, breathless.
The bulkhead door blocking the way ahead is massive, as wide as the gantry and made from one solid piece of reinforced plasteel that’s easily as thick as the hull of a tank. The Sighted’s spiral mark has been daubed on the face of it, at least six feet high. As Raine approaches it with Hale and his squad she can see that the spiral is made up of words.
Only by Nine, it says, over and over again.
Raine scowls and spits onto the deck. This close to the core, the floor is crowded with jagged clusters of crystal and puddles of oil that mingle with all of the spilt blood.
‘Wyck, set Yulia to work on the door,’ Hale says. ‘I want it broken.’
‘Aye, sir,’ Wyck says.
The splinter pattern on Wyck’s fatigues is almost lost to filth and blood. His face is cut and bruised, and his fair hair is dark with ashes. Only the aquila on the chain around his neck remains bright and clear to see.
‘Be precise,’ Hale says. ‘The void has taken quite enough from us today.’
Wyck glances momentarily at the armourglass viewport, and Raine sees him take a breath.
‘Got it,’ he says, and he shouts for Crys and moves off to the bulkhead.
‘How are we doing, Nuria?’ Hale asks.
The medic is almost as bloody as Wyck. She shakes her head and sighs. ‘I won’t lie, Yuri, it could be better.’ She glances back to where the rest of the squads are mustering and keeping watch. ‘The Fenwalkers are as good as dead. Only the new recruits left standing. Koy’s watching over them as well as her own, now. The Hartkin have fared little better. We’re looking at one in eight dead, or worse.’
Raine feels the weight of their losses heavily then, and not just Grey Company, but Blue and Gold too. All of them. Hundreds of Antari souls, damned to die by High Command because of what she knows.
‘Their sacrifice will not be wasted,’ she says, as much to herself as to Hale and Lye. ‘We will make the enemy pay in blood for those we have lost.’
Hale nods. ‘Aye, commissar,’ he says. ‘For every death.’
‘Breach is set, captain,’ Crys shouts.
The combat engineer jogs back towards them, trailing a line of det cord. Everyone else gets at least as far back as Crys does. Five charges are affixed around the edges of the bulkhead door, with det cord running between them along the seals. Raine knows that the charges are custom-made, like all of Crys’ demolitions kit. Built for the job at hand, and the environment they face.
‘When the bulkhead goes, we push straight through,’ Hale says, over the company channel. ‘No hesitation. Go for the kill.’
‘Aye, for the kill!’
The answer comes from every squad sergeant left standing.
‘On my word, Yulia,’ Hale says.
‘Yessir,’ Crys says, with a grin.
‘Break it,’ Hale snarls.
Crys flips the switch on the detonator, and the det cord lights in a bright white instant, like the heart of a star. The charges follow, triggered by the cord. They detonate so quickly that Raine can’t separate the noise. It all just becomes one long boom and an exhaled plume of smoke that stings her throat and her eyes, and then it is over, and there is nothing left of the bulkhead but a twisted, splintered mess, and through the doorway, the outer core.
‘Go!’ Hale shouts. ‘Straight through, for the kill!’
Raine breaks cover alongside the Antari and runs for the outer core, through smoke and freezing cold water from the fire suppressors. A storm, inside the shipyards. Everything is painted crimson by the emergency lighting. Alarums wail, but louder still is the machine voice of Axhon-Pho.
Raine sees the outer core in glimpses as she runs through the smoke. It is a massive circular chamber, lined with thick knots of piping and cables. The Sighted have built several rows of fortifications and barricades from scrap and sandbags between the gantries and the bulkheads that lead to the command core. Targeting lasers pierce the smoke all around Raine as she reaches the first row of barricades and vaults them, landing amongst the Sighted on the other side. They are still reeling from the explosion that destroyed the door. Some are bleeding. Some aflame. Las-fire strobes in the smoke, and the fight becomes a series of instants painted in red and gold.
Firing Penance and sending black blood scattering across the deck.
Lydia Zane splintering bone and metal alike with a clap of her hands.
Daven Wyck slamming one of the Sighted against the barricades.
Cassia Tyl killing with whispers of hellgun fire.
Yuri Hale’s chainsword snarling and sending more black blood into the air.
And then over the shouting and the gunfire and Axhon-Pho’s droning, Raine hears somet
hing else.
The high-pitched whine of automated turrets.
‘Take cover!’ she shouts into the vox.
Raine ducks back onto the other side of the barricades as the automated turrets fire, cutting through the smoke and clattering against the barricades and the deck. The order echoes down the line from the squad sergeants and from Hale. Shouts echo too. Screams. Sparks fly everywhere. All along the line, the Antari of Grey Company seek safety in the shadow of the barricades as the heavy gunfire tracks along it, splintering metal and plasteel. Raine sees one of Koy’s Mistvypers hit by it, splintered just as easily. Dead in an instant.
‘Zane!’ Hale shouts, from beside Raine. ‘Shields!’
The psyker is on her knees, shaking and bleeding badly from that gunshot wound in her leg. She looks down the line and holds up her hands, making barricades for the barricades where she can, but her shielding is flickering and faltering.
‘I cannot protect them all, captain,’ she says, through blood and drool. ‘It is too far. It is too much.’
‘Do what you can,’ Hale says, as he unhooks the vox handset from Kayd’s kit.
‘This is Grey,’ Hale says. ‘Devri, do you read?’
‘I hear you, Grey,’ he says. Devri sounds like he’s in pain. ‘I’m almost at the auguries. We’ve got resistance.’
Zane is moaning through her teeth now and weeping from her false eyes. Frost spreads out from her across the deck. Raine ducks again as a high calibre round slips through and takes a chunk out of the barricade by her head.
‘Resistance or not, if you don’t blind the magos, we’re dead,’ Hale says.
Zane cries out then and her limited shielding fails. Screams echo. Silhouetted figures spill away from the barricades, torn apart by gunfire.
‘Now, Devri!’ Hale shouts, into the handset.
And there is a huge tremor that rattles the deck underfoot. For an instant the gunfire and the magos fall quiet. In that moment, Raine can hear nothing but the cries and the moans of the dying.
‘Auguries destroyed,’ Devri says, over the vox. ‘Go for the kill, Yuri.’
Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Page 37
