Think, Furia told herself. She isn’t going to give up. But what can she try if we have ended the means of her research?
Only they hadn’t, she realised. There was no sign of Andoval either.
Finding Orbiana became even more urgent. She would be desperate to continue her work. She would be willing to take greater risks.
Furia ran. Her bionic leg set the rhythm. She pounded with clockwork precision and machinic speed down the corridors and staircases. She headed for the lowest levels, for the regions furthest away from the bridge. She raced, acting on a guess rather than a deduction, but her gut had served her well in the past. It was a form of faith, the sort of faith that Styer had to learn to trust. There was no question of the justicar’s purity of mind and dedication to the God-Emperor. But he doubted the accuracy of the prognostication because it was not a rational one. She understood the need for evidence. Sometimes, though, it was necessary to act in its complete absence.
She didn’t know where Orbiana was. She was rushing to where she would imagine the other inquisitor finding a final refuge for her work. She headed into the bowels of the ship, deep into the cargo area, into the sloped, tapering nose, where corridors dead-ended, where ceilings slanted down, where access passages were a forgotten tangle. This was the domain of the awkward corners of the vessel. It was the least-used area of the ship.
The nose was about two hundred metres long, and about fifty across at its widest point. It had only one level, the steep angle of the upper hull rendering it more impractical. A passageway ran down the centre, intersected by smaller access routes. Halfway towards the tip, Furia saw a narrow corridor to port that had fallen into shadow. The lumen globes, sparse already, had all been removed. Furia took that route. Her bionic eye adjusted to the absence of light. A dozen metres, and she hit another branch. Deeper darkness in either direction. She listened, augmetic hearing filtering the groans of the ship. Nothing.
But to her left, the nothing had definition. There was a patch of total absence of sound. Even the ship’s stirrings were silenced. She went left.
The cramped access passage angled, then ended in a steel door. It was not as secure as the vault door had been, but it was still covered by a web of hexagrammic sigils. In the walls around it, Furia could make out the electronic traceries. Sound dampening, she presumed. No one would ever think to investigate this corner of the ship, because it would never call attention to itself.
Furia uncoiled her neural whip from around her waist. She lashed at the wall with it. The electrical charge was designed to incapacitate organic beings. Its surge took out the dampeners. The walls screamed. Feedback raced down the corridor behind Furia. Sparks flashed blue. A continuing chain of short circuits and smouldering wires produced a faint, wavering red glow in the hall.
She had announced her presence. She waited.
The door opened. Orbiana emerged and closed it behind her. She carried her xenos gun. At her waist was an electro-flail.
‘Send the sage out,’ Furia said.
‘No.’
‘You no longer have any authority on this ship.’
‘I have the authority of force. Our work will continue. Andoval is on the verge of a breakthrough. He will finish.’
‘I will get past you.’
‘I doubt it.’
Furia looked at the door behind Orbiana again. Now that she had a better idea of the path of research Orbiana and Andoval were following, the inadequacy of the protection was flagrant. Orbiana’s obsession had pushed her to desperation. She wasn’t just taking risks now. She was actively courting disaster.
Furia was unsurprised. Orbiana’s behaviour confirmed her beliefs about the Xanthites. They would inevitably cross a fatal line. There would be no convincing Orbiana to pull back from madness. Even so, Furia tried one final time. ‘In the name of the God-Emperor, stop this now,’ she said. ‘We will be under attack from orks within the hour.’
‘In His name, let me finish.’
‘You don’t believe you can.’
‘We are close. This time, we have the answer.’
‘This time? How often have you thought you were on the verge of success?’
Orbiana didn’t answer. In the faint light, her face was a mask of stone. Her eyes burned, though. They shimmered with the light of passion and with hatred for those who would thwart her holy mission.
Where lay the difference between the radical and the heretic? It lay nowhere, Furia thought. Proof stood before her.
‘Go now,’ Orbiana hissed. She raised the gun.
Furia crouched low and cracked the neural whip forward. Orbiana’s power armour absorbed the charge, but Furia’s yank was enough to spoil Orbiana’s aim. The writhing green beam struck the wall above her head on the right. It stripped away the stone cladding and opened a long wound in the metal iron framework. Furia launched herself forward, a bionic-driven cannon shell. Orbiana swung her arms in to counter. The inquisitors collided. Furia had angled her leap to hit with her reconstructed shoulder. The impact still rang down her spine like a hammer blow. Orbiana simply took a single step back against the door.
Furia couldn’t overcome the strength of the power armour. But she was too close now for her foe to use the gun. Her whip was still coiled around Orbiana’s left arm, impeding her motion. Orbiana struck back with brute force, lunging forward and forcing her arms down at a hard angle. They hit like a battering ram. She slammed Furia into the left-hand wall. Marble cracked. So did ribs. The metal in her frame absorbed the worst of the damage, but she felt servo-motors slip and misfire in her left leg. Its movements were a fraction of a second behind her will. She let her knees buckle. She slid down as Orbiana dropped the gun and drove a fist into the spot where her head had been a moment before. Orbiana punched her forearm through the wall. When she pulled back, something caught and jerked her to a stop. The immobility lasted an eyeblink. It was enough for Furia to slip out and around.
She had to keep moving, use speed to counter power. Even with the damage to her limbs, she was fast, a shadow, a thought, a serpent’s strike. She rose, drawing her knife. The power blade was a streak of violet light in the dark. She was taller than Orbiana, and she aimed the knife for the back of her unprotected skull. Orbiana freed herself from the wall and whirled, bringing up her left arm. She was fast enough to save her life, but Furia cut through the elbow joint of the armour. Her blade plunged into the armour’s seam, severing fibre bundles, and then the flesh and tendons below them. She pulled the blade out at an angle, sawing again. Actuators lost contact with muscular impulses. Orbiana’s arm went limp. It was a dead weight hanging from her shoulder.
She grunted and ran against Furia, trying to ram her against the other wall. Furia moved with the blow, gaining a hair’s width lead on Orbiana, and she slipped out of the way just before being crushed. She danced around Orbiana to the other inquisitor’s right. She aimed at the other arm.
Her damaged left leg locked. She was frozen to the spot for a moment. When she could move again, the fraction of a second had returned the momentum of the battle to Orbiana. She held her electro-flail in her right hand. She swung it. Furia regained command of her leg and threw herself into a backward somersault. She was half through the tumble when the flails connected with her waist. Again, the rebuilt half of her frame took the hit, so she wasn’t snapped in half. But the multiple electrical discharges sent her bionics into seizures. Knocked sideways, she hit the ground in a heap. Her left hand spasmed open and closed. Her leg drummed against the deck. Her right side was numb. She couldn’t move.
Orbiana loomed over her. She raised the flail again. Furia watched the upward arc. She was fast. She had all the time in the world to evade such a heavy, slow attack. But she couldn’t move. Her body did not belong to her. It was a marionette twitching on the end of electric chains.
The flail began its descent. It would shatter her skull. Go, s
he thought. Go, she told the numbness and the jerking. Move! Half her body had no feeling, but it would obey her commands. She managed to roll towards Orbiana. Two of the flail heads hit the deck just beyond her. The third bounced up and came back down hard on her throat. There was an intimate crunch and discharge snap as it crushed her bionic larynx.
She was silenced. She drew breath with a laboured hiss. But she had the use of her limbs again. Slower than she should be, still faster than Orbiana, she used her arms to propel herself around the other inquisitor and up again. She ran forward two steps, putting some space between them. And that was all the room she would have: the door was before her.
She turned around. Orbiana’s gun lay on the deck between them. Even now, she was not tempted. Picking up the weapon wasn’t even a choice. She avoided it on instinct. Contact with it would have offended her very soul. If she’d had time to think, she would have considered victory with a xenos weapon to be a worse defeat than death.
But there wasn’t time to think. There was only time for one of them to die.
Orbiana whirled the flail over her head. Furia threw her blade.
She was still fast.
Orbiana reacted to the blur of the strike. She turned her head. The blade missed her eye. It stabbed through her cheekbone, deep into her mouth. She choked and stumbled. Her arm lashed out at the pain. She smashed the flail down. It struck the xenos weapon.
Orbiana was strong. The weapon was powerful. The blow shattered the integrity of the gun. Its energy was released in a single, uncontrolled burst.
Furia saw the danger in the final, stretched moment before the catastrophe took them both. As she threw the knife, she was already moving to a crouch and bringing her arm up against the flail. The flash was the stripping away of existence. Something slashed at her body. It stripped her being away in layers. It hit with a thrummmm and the vibrations were the terrible song of her disintegration. Her eyes were shut and she could still see the searing green.
Orbiana cried out. There was denial in the shout. There was despair. There was rage. There was no pain, but there was anguish.
The cry was cut short. The light faded. Furia opened her eyes. She saw only through the bionic one. She still couldn’t feel anything on the right. There was something worse than numbness, though. There was absence. She thought she had lowered her arm, and then she realised that she couldn’t have. It was gone.
Residual energy from the weapon crackled over the walls and ceiling. Orbiana had taken the brunt of the blast. There was very little to mark her existence. Part of her skull. A hand, still clenched.
Furia lay against the door, surrounded by a spreading pool of her blood. Her breath whistled in and out with a sound like rust. She could move her head. She turned it until she could see the door that she could not open. Orbiana should not have despaired at the last, Furia thought. The irony felt like a spear through her chest. Beyond the door, Andoval continued Orbiana’s work. He did not know that there was no one left for him to serve. Furia could not stop him. She did not know if her vox-bead was still functional, but she had no voice to use it. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t warn Styer.
Full dark returned. It gathered around Furia as she faded in and out of consciousness. She tried to stay awake. She waited.
She waited for time to run out, and for the fates to raise the final curtain. Her head echoed with the silent cry of her own rage.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ARRIVALS
The orks had boarding torpedoes. They were crude devices. Three of them hit the outer hull of the landing bay like rockets. They punched ragged holes in the ship, and it was the Scouring Light’s own defences that spread foam sealant over the tears, keeping the atmosphere from howling out into the void. The nose of one of the torpedoes was crushed by the impact. No orks emerged. The other two disgorged forty of the brutes into the landing bay.
Brauner had thought he was done with the greenskins when the Stormraven took him away from Squire’s Rest. He had been in a kind of limbo since arriving on the Scouring Light, bereft of official duty, helping with the maintenance in the launch bay, waiting for the unknowable warriors to decide his fate. Now it turned out that the orks were not done with him. It seemed they missed him. That was what he told himself, a bad joke to boost his bravado as war came for him again.
Brauner was in the bay with a few dozen of Orbiana’s warrior acolytes. The Grey Knights had taken the weapons and armour they had brought over from the Tyndaris and were stationed on the bridge. One of their number, Warheit, had taken the Harrower out of the Scouring Light to harry the ork ships that tried to close with the sloop.
These were good measures. But they would not be enough. Brauner didn’t know how many vessels the orks had brought to the battle. He didn’t have to. The orks always came in numbers. They would overwhelm the defences, and they would be in the ship. There was no way of defending every point of entry. The Space Marines had the ship’s most vital point. The landing bay also had strategic value.
The Inquisition forces were better armed than the settlers. They had armour. They had youth. They had training and fanaticism. Any one of them might, in time, become as formidable as Orbiana. Brauner didn’t think they would last more than a few minutes. The one thing they didn’t have was leadership. No one knew where either inquisitor was. Orbiana’s absence hurt the morale of her troops.
He couldn’t understand why they were making a stand. Defeat was inevitable. If the Grey Knights and the Inquisition wanted the Scouring Light to survive, they should be racing for the system’s Mandeville point.
The decision wasn’t his; his decision was the duty to fight for as long as he could. So he fought. Solid barricades had been set up between the outer doors and the exit to the rest of the ship. Brauner rested the barrel of his lasrifle on the top of the barricade and fired. He had been offered one of the kroot long guns and had refused, preferring the sanctity of Imperial workmanship.
He and the acolytes hit the orks with a concentrated barrage. They took down the first few to emerge from the torpedoes. The others came running. Brauner saw the distance between the barricades and the orks diminish with every pull of the trigger. More orks fell. Still more continued the charge. Their fire was wild. It was copious. The head of the man next to Brauner exploded. The acolytes’ barrage faltered.
Another torpedo burst through the outer wall. More orks piled out as the first groups closed with the barricades. Brauner took out the eyes of one brute. It howled and struck out blindly with its chainaxe. It cut one of its kin in half. Others beat it to death. For the time it took them to trample it down, Brauner had delayed a section of the charge.
The delay lasted seconds.
A huge ork led the way. It wore a plated exoskeleton that looked like a brutish conception of Space Marine armour. Chains of human and eldar skulls hung from its arms. Spikes curled up from the shoulder plates. The ork swaggered. In one hand, it wielded a hammer big enough to be a Dreadnought’s power fist. In the other, it carried a gun whose barrel looked too wide to work.
It worked very well. Each shot fired a shell that hit the barricade with enough force to blast through. Metal erupted by Brauner’s right cheek. A slug burned his flesh as it streaked by and embedded itself in the far wall. The monster’s armour absorbed the energy from Brauner’s las and the beams of the long guns. It began to glow with heat. The ork laughed and ran faster, shaking the deck with the weight of its tread.
Three more pulls of the trigger. Brauner wanted to see at least one more ork die. One more enemy before the wave hit. His lips mouthed a prayer. It was unanswered. He burned the face of a foot soldier and that was all.
The orks slammed into the barricade. They leaped over it, swinging blades and axes. The leader drove straight into the metal shield. Its momentum was unstoppable. It tore through the barricade. The acolytes behind it went down under the ork’s boots. Flak armour
splintered and bodies burst. Brauner stabbed his bayonet forward. It sank into an ork’s shoulder. The beast swatted him. He flew backwards, skidding along the floor.
Old man pain in his old man bones. Old soldier humiliation at being dismissed with such contempt by a simple ork foot soldier. He struggled to his feet. At least he managed to hold on to his rifle. Then he hesitated. At the barricades, the fight was over. A few acolytes still struggled. They were already going down. The orks were pausing just long enough to finish them off. They shouted with laughter as they butchered the humans.
The green tide was about to invade the interior of the Scouring Light. It had been held back for less than a minute.
Brauner’s fingers tightened on the trigger. Then he turned and ran for the door. He had a few seconds’ lead. He ran through the exit and sealed the door behind him, gaining another few moments. The ork that had struck him had saved his life.
He heard a massive rumble and crash on the other side of the door. The orks would be through the door soon. He backed away, trying to think. Do something, he told himself. Do something useful. Making a heroic stand here was not useful. It was stupid. The orks wouldn’t even notice him as they ran him down.
Do something.
He ran down the corridor, his old man pace stealing the moments he had gained. The first intersection was coming up. There were explosions behind him. Rending metal. He almost fell around the corner as shouts and the tramp of the orks filled the air, echoes bouncing off the walls like bullets. The tapestries that Brauner ran past were tributes to irony. Portrayals of ork defeats would bear witness to their triumph.
He reached another side passage and took it, then turned again, still moving towards the bow, still searching for a purpose. The corridor he was in was a narrower one. He didn’t think the orks had seen him.
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