‘You sure? The captains of the smaller ships co-operating with the ones on the hulk?’ Hyl’s tone was sceptical and Challis nodded agreement.
‘They can’t stop fighting among themselves, from what I’ve seen since I’ve been trapped here,’ he said. ‘They’ve even divided this craft into territories, as far as I can tell. Some of the greenskins wear different paints, like gang colours, though that doesn’t seem to matter much. I’ve seen ones from the same bunch bash each other around a good amount.’ Challis shook his head. ‘No, the damn beasts are too dumb to co-operate.’
Hyl added her agreement in turn. ‘You must have been boarded straight from the hulk.’
‘I intend no insolence, sir, ma’am, but I am sure it was the smaller ship. That was part of our study, to find out how orks co-operate. Normally they don’t, as you’ve seen, but you do find rivals co-existing when…’
The rest were gathering around now to listen, but Korland had frozen under Challis’s gaze.
‘When what, Korland? What are you saying has got them all working together?’
‘I think there’s a war on the way, sir. A crusade of some sort, catching up orks from all across the sector. The orks have a word for it, or we think… thought it might be a word, just a kind of bellow…’
Challis swallowed, took a deep breath. Hyl closed her eyes and bowed her head.
‘I’ve heard of them, these great greenskin wars. Great Terra, what have we been caught up in?’
‘That’s why my master was trying to capture specimens, sir! We thought we might be able to divine the target of the war from them! It fits, sir - the migrations of orks from all around, we’ve been able to track them, the lack of infighting, the capturing of slaves to build war engines…’
‘We just needed to discern the trigger…’ Challis’s gaze zeroed in on him again. Korland’s voice faltered for a moment before he went on.
‘A crusade like this usually has a trigger, a focal point, something to turn the orks’ aggression outward. I think I know what it is.’
All of the slaves were looking at Korland now.
‘The Adeptus Astartes, sir. Master Cort knew something of the ork language, and he told us what he had been able to discern. This hulk, other greenskin ships, they’re all being drawn to a system where the orks are at war with the Astartes.’
Challis squinted at him, waiting for an explanation; beside him Hyl’s eyes widened.
‘The Astartes,’ she breathed. ‘We’re going to be sent to war against the Space Marines.’
‘Space Marines?’ Challis said incredulously. ‘The, what do they call them, the Angels of Death? From the stories and hymns? Lord Dante and all the rest? I’ve heard some of these names, there was a pageant every year at Noatun. All the tales paint them as gods-in-flesh. You’re telling me that’s what we’re going to be meeting? In a song or a tale, maybe, but…’ He looked to Hyl for support but she was shaking her head.
‘They are real, Challis, trust me. They came aboard our ship once, long ago when I was a girl. They had come to save our convoy from…’ Hyl stopped speaking and bit her lip. She raised her head up to look at the darkness above them and simply said, ‘Yes, they are real.’
Korland had folded his arms, as if watching a slow student help an even slower one do their numbers. And as he watched, a fire began to come into Challis’s face, the grimness turning to a savage joy.
‘Do you realise what you’re saying? Either of you? Did you hear that, the rest of you? Don’t look so miserable, Korland: you’ve just given us something to fight for!’
Challis stood and walked around, facing each slave with blazing eyes.
‘Don’t you understand? This hulk’s days must be numbered now! Listen to what Korland is telling us! The Astartes! The Emperor’s own! No cowering in tunnels for us, not now! Think of what you have to hold out for! The day when the Astartes break this ship’s back and come to free us! Liberation Day!’
Challis threw back his head and laughed.
Fifty-eight days to liberation
THERE WAS A human skull lying in a silt-drift where the corridor crumpled through an angle; despite herself, Hyl had been watching it for several minutes. She was getting used enough now to the fungus-light of these levels to be able to pick out shapes, although it had taken her eyes days to adapt. She had been terrified at first that Challis or one of the others would order that she be left behind as they moved through the Wilds.
Wilds. It had been Korland’s term. A great wedge of old ship - Hyl thought it must have been a transport - driven edgewise into the giant wreck that made up the hulk’s backbone. The ship was canted over at an angle, sealed off from the surrounding decks as it wrecked them in that long-ago crash, cut off from most of the power supplies, some parts airless and locked in lethal cold, much of it choked with rot and silt that had come from who knew where. When the greenskins had come they had filled the Wilds with their own fungi and feral beasts, closed up whatever openings remained and left them.
‘These decks were their larder and their livestock-pen,’ Challis had told them. ‘Whenever they needed to hunt food or catch beasts to fight for them they would come in hunting parties and seal up behind them when they left again. Shadowing the hunting-packs was how I got to know the ways in and out.’
The Wilds had also been a jail. Hyl shifted in her spot and looked at the skull again. No camps in the outer hull for Challis and the thousands from his hive: in the charge of a different slave-master than her own band, they had been herded into the Wilds and sealed there, perchance to be rounded up again at the end of the voyage but as likely to serve as beast-food before then. Challis had not spoken of how the other captives had died, and the darkness that took his expression at those times meant that no one had pressed him.
She shifted round and looked at the shaft behind her as voices drifted up it.
‘It’s working, sir. Damn, but it’s working! Three more of ‘em dead since yesterday and still not one of ‘em looks like coming out on top. There’ll be more to follow, I don’t doubt.’
She could hear the wolfish satisfaction in Cantle’s voice, muffled as it was. He had been a maintenance rating aboard his old ship, and knew how to slip through the hulk’s crawlspaces like an oiled shadow. He had been spying on the orks that they had tried Korland’s latest theory on: assassinate any large ork and its warband would neutralise itself for days, dissolving in petty brawls as the others fought for dominance. Impending ork-crusade or no, it seemed to be working so far.
Hyl leaned into the shaft and peered down, leaving Luder to guard the corridor with a captured ork pistol that it took the other woman both hands to lift, hefting it by the crude shoulder-stock they had had to make for it before any of the slaves could use it. Below her, the shaft ended in a flattened, malformed plug of metal and ceramite, three dead rocket-ports gaping up at her in the dimness.
It had been Cantle who first recognised it for what it was when they had discovered this shaft: a boarding torpedo, remnant of a long-ago Imperial attack. The shaft - Hyl looked up at the odd, lumpy walls where layers of decking had been half-melted and smashed aside - had been the tunnel it had bored deep into the hulk before it ground to a halt in this wreck’s guts. Old as it was, it had cheered the ex-slaves, bone-weary after days of hit-and-run raids and ambushes against the greenskins in the mazes of decking. It was a reminder that somewhere out there were humans, an Imperium, the wait for liberation day.
There were sounds below her. Cantle had squeezed out through a rent in the torpedo’s side and was clambering out of the pit it lay in. Hyl caught his hand and pulled him up to the floor she stood on, and he grinned at her.
‘Go on, hop down, have a look. Challis is in pretty good spirits.’
Hyl swung herself over the edge and felt her way downward. The air in the shaft still had a faint tang of oilsmoke: two weeks ago Luder had had the idea of burning stolen motor fuel in the airways, the smoke too thin to affect them but enough to bl
unt the fine noses of the beast-hounds. They hadn’t bothered keeping the fires up since she and Challis had led a sabotage team to blow out an air-seal, opening the orks’ kennels into space.
She hoped Cantle was right about their leader’s mood. Lucky as the find was, she thought Challis still hadn’t forgiven Korland for sneaking off - alone of all things! - to investigate the shaft during his assigned sentry shift. She could remember hearing their argument echoing through the little amphitheatre they used as a base.
‘And you wonder why I was angry? This is not a game, child, or some scholarly investigation. Lives are at stake. We need everyone! That includes you and that bucket of learnin’ you have. How dare you run off like that, without a word to Hyl, or me, or—’
But Korland had been unrepentant, not letting up until Challis had followed him back out to see the torpedo for himself. Hyl leaned close and fitted her head and shoulders through the gap. Challis was the suggestion of an outline around the little glow of his igniter and, peering about, she could start to make out the dim shapes of corpses, dried and shrivelled, still locked into their pews and sunken into heavy environment suits and carapace armour. Challis was braced against a column that ran down the middle of the torpedo, a column studded with what had to be weapon racks.
‘I’ve got the lockers open, managed to get a look inside. Lasers and stubbers, a grenade launcher I think we can fix, hand weapons. Enough for about half of us. Weapons made for humans, not salvaged ork guns we can barely use.’ Hyl clambered through the hole to join him, standing awkwardly on the tilted floor as he pointed to the compartments around them.
‘There’s damage to this thing. I don’t know what caused it, but it looks like that’s what killed the crew.’ Hyl looked around. The torpedo casing was full of gouges and dents from its passage through the hull, and below her toward the point there was a great circular wound there the skin of the torpedo had been punched inward.
‘But look up here,’ said Challis. ‘The ammo lockers on these things look like they’re made to last, and I mean last. Lasgun cells will keep for just about ever, and I think there are even flamer tanks back there that survived the impact.’
Challis grunted with satisfaction as he forced a stiff clamp open and turned around with a matt-grey assault shotgun in his hands.
‘We’re going to be an army now, Hyl. Not a rag-arsed collection of escapees. Korland’s words about the Astartes were an omen, right enough. The Emperor’s grace brought us news of our freedom, now He’s given us the tools to meet our liberators proudly. Weapons in our hands and the blood of greenskins on our fists.’ But Challis’s tone was still thoughtful, his eyes hooded.
‘Something’s still on your mind, though, Challis. What is it?’
‘Cantle told me that starships have other kinds of these…’ he gestured around them.
‘Torpedoes.’
‘Torpedoes. But they don’t carry warriors, they carry bombs. That’s what’s preying on me now, Hyl. We can fend off these creatures until this hulk goes into its battle, but the Astartes won’t know we are here. We have to find a way to make sure they come to free us instead of just firing on this thing and blowing it to pieces. We need to find a way to tell them we’re here.’
Hyl took a breath.
‘That’s why I came to find you, Challis. I think I know where that chamber of witch-orks you told us about is, and I’ve been talking to Korland about it. I think we have a way to call the Space Marines to free us.’
Thirty days to liberation
WITCHCRAFT. CHALLIS LOATHED the idea, loathed alien witchcraft even more, but there was nothing else for it now. Challis still couldn’t fully accept that space ships needed sorcery to talk to one another, even after Hyl and Roland had explained it to him as best they could.
Ever since the gut-wrenching half-day when the hulk had fought its way back into real space they had been on edge. And when the scouts had reported a rush of agitated orks to the hangars and gun decks, and distant flares of light beyond the viewports, they knew a battle had begun.
Now he was back at the witch-place, crouched in a breach in the wall of what Hyl said had once been the Navigator cathedral. His eyes wanted to lose focus and the air tasted of metal and felt hot and cold at once and there was a constant pressured feeling as though they were in a fast-dropping lift. Witchcraft.
Spread out below them was the scene he remembered, no less strange for seeing it a second time. Filling the tiered pews were scores of greenskins, chained together with heavy copper shackles. Some seemed to be concentrating and muttering; others were thrashing and yelling, green sparks flying from their eyes and ears.
The great holograph globe hanging above the chamber was cracked and long broken, but occasionally when a sparking greenskin looked at it would brighten with green mist and faint images, though the greenskins paid little attention to it. Pictures: outlines of giant craft against the stars or bellowing greenskins in what Challis realised with a jolt were other ships in the fleet.
Oh yes, this was the place alright. The place where these spark-spitting orks talked to others on other ships and helped the hulk’s commanders see their enemies. The witch-powered aliens who, Korland had told them confidently, would die of their own excitement as soon as any fighting started, leaving the hulk blinded and the greenskins unable to communicate.
Fine. As long as they made some kind of contact first. The place had taken him a week to find again; the raid had taken three times that long to prepare. There would be one chance only.
The force of the orks’ brains beat at his eardrums like surf in a storm, and Challis almost didn’t hear the muffled explosion at the far end of the chamber as their bombs went off. Then smoke began to roil from several places along the walls and suddenly the air was filled with screams as the chained orks began to convulse and catch fire. Green smoke spurted from mouths, arcs of power crackled between ears, eyes lit up like emerald searchlights.
Challis kicked open the air vent and rappelled down the wall, the rest of his team behind him. Hyl’s shoulder jerked as her grenade launcher recoiled, and flechettes stippled the skins of a dozen howling orks. Challis’s shotgun boomed twice and felled a surprised attendant as Keif’s flamer lit the air behind them.
Challis felt his head being crushed in an invisible vice. Next to him, blood was running from Luder’s nose and mouth. In front of them, two orks’ heads exploded in showers of green light.
He ran to stand in front of the biggest witch-ork, forced himself to look the creature in the eye. Slowly, so that its brain would blast the image out into the minds of every astropath in the system, he raised his shotgun and spoke.
‘My name is Challis. There are humans on this hulk. We beg you, help us in liberation!’
There were shots and cries from behind him, and he forced himself not to flinch.
‘Please! If anyone hears this!’
And then, suddenly, the creature straightened from its orkish slouch and stood over him. Its expression changed, its eyes fixed on him. As it spoke in a deep, oddly accented human voice the green steam around it seemed to curl into the suggestion of a helmet and faceplate, curved shoulder-guards and a great cloak.
‘Human Challis. I speak from the battle-barge Ragnarok. You will undermine the turrets and defeat the shields for the wing of the hulk from which you speak. You will open it for attacks by my company and—’
Challis stammered to speak, ‘W-we are poorly armed. I am unsure of where this wing is you speak of. I—’
The ork leaned over Challis, voice booming. ‘Pay heed! The place you speak from juts from the side of your misshapen craft like a wing. It is decked with cannon and turrets, guns the orks will use to fire at us as we close the distance to storm it, walls of energy that mean we cannot teleport in to find you.’
Challis fought to think through the psychic yammer around him. He remembered the crater in the front of their boarding torpedo. How could he have been so stupid? They would fly at the hulk
and their torpedoes would be shot at, breached, the great Astartes might even perish…
Above him the image faded for a moment as the witch-ork began to convulse, then sharpened and spoke again.
‘We shall watch you, Challis, and mount our sortie when your destruction of the defences is done. Even as I speak we are in battle, and the defences must be open in thirty days or our attack may fail. Know that we will fight to liberate you, but know that you must fight too before we can reach you. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, yes sir.’ The gaze looking at him through the creature’s eyes seemed to hold him like an iron clamp.
‘We will meet thirty days hence, then. Farewell, human Challis.’
The ork’s head slowly crumpled into fragments. Challis felt blood erupt from his own nose. There was a fizzing sensation under his skin. His vision swam as he looked around. With an exultant shout Cantle completed his adjustments to a half-wrecked console and blast shutters slammed over every door from the chambers. In the flames and bedlam they sprinted for their tunnel as, behind them, the last of the orks overloaded in a deafening blast of green light.
Liberation day
UP AHEAD THE barricades had gone up as he instructed. Behind them the ork mob rounded the corner, their fury seeming to intensify with every step, and all around came the distant boom of explosions as the slaves’ sabotage did its work.
Keif was dead, gone in the first of the great detonations they had triggered in the base of the bridge-tower. There had been more orks than anyone had been ready for, and just as Challis was realising that they would never be able to fight their way down the stairs to the power regulators, Keif had kicked the drum of promethium off the edge of the catwalk they had been fighting on and leapt after it, turning his flamer on himself to become a dying, blazing detonator. They could only hope that the explosion had done enough damage to destroy the shields that the Astartes had spoken of.
Liberation Day - Matthew Farrer Page 2
