She’d not spoken her homeland’s dialect in half a century, yet it was like honey on her tongue. ‘We’re already talking. Tell me your name, if you please.’
‘I wonder, why is it that the simplest questions have the hardest answers? Most recently, I’ve been going by Damon.’ He offered his hand for her to shake. Unfamiliar with the Terran custom, she simply glanced at it, then stared back into his eyes.
‘Just Damon.’ Disapproval made it a question.
‘Damon Prytanis,’ he said.
‘That isn’t your real name.’
‘It isn’t the name I was born with,’ he admitted with a smile, ‘but that doesn’t make it any less real, or any less mine.’
‘I am leaving,’ she lied. The qattari knife was starting to feel tempting.
‘No you’re not. And don’t reach for that blade. I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to save you.’
‘You think I need saving?’
‘I know you need saving. Everyone does, from time to time. Do you have any idea how difficult it was for me to infiltrate the Word Bearers flagship just to have this conversation?’
Infiltrate. He said infiltrate.
He wasn’t on their side.
‘I’m not on anyone’s side,’ he said, though she hadn’t spoken a word. ‘I know,’ he added. ‘I can read your mind.’
She turned to run, but Damon reached for her wrist, holding it tight. ‘You died and came back again,’ he said to her gently. ‘We have that in common. The Cabal have taken an interest in you, and for humans that’s almost always a bad thing. But you’re like us now. The Seventeenth Legion made you into one of us. I can’t say whether they meant to. I wouldn’t even want to guess.’
‘One of what? What are you talking about?’
‘The undying. The Perpetuals.’ Damon Prytanis didn’t smile that time – he outright grinned. ‘Come with me, Cyrene.’
‘Eshramar!’ she shouted. ‘Eshramar!’
The Vakrah Jal warrior entered at the other end of the chamber, taking less than a heartbeat to see her and the danger she was in. The turbines on his back screamed into life as he started running, and after three steps he kicked off the deck, jump pack howling.
Damon refused to release Cyrene’s wrist, even as he faced the Word Bearer diving through the maze of statues, streaming smoky fire. He swore in several languages, one of which sounded like a particularly elegant eldar dialect, and none of which Cyrene understood.
The Vakrah Jal sergeant landed with a crunch of ceramite on the deck, both wrist-mounted flamers aimed at the false thrall. Alchemical fire bubbled in the connective cables along his arms, boiling, waiting to roar into the air and turn from liquid to true flame.
‘Move away from her,’ Eshramar demanded. His silver Mark III faceplate stared with surprising vehemence. Smoke wisped around the three of them, trailing from the exhaust vents in the Word Bearer’s turbine backpack.
‘Listen–’ Damon began.
‘Move away from her.’
‘Listen to me.’
‘Move away from her.’
‘Cyrene, I can explain everything,’ he said.
‘Move away from her.’
Damon raised his hands and took a single step forwards. In the same moment, Cyrene rammed her ritual knife into his shoulder. She’d been aiming for his neck, but he wove aside even with his back to her – the man’s reactions were far too fluid to be entirely human.
He didn’t scream, didn’t even curse, but he did lose his grip. She threw herself to the side.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Cyrene, wait!’
Eshramar closed both hands into fists, triggering the pressure pads in his gauntlets’ palms. Fire the colour of diseased jade burst from his wrist-flamers, bathing the human in a sustained, semi-liquid torrent. It dissolved the meat from his bones in the time it took Cyrene to pick herself up and turn to look back.
Damon Prytanis died before their eyes, in what might be the most painful way to meet one’s end.
It was the first time he’d died in flame, but not the first time he’d died laughing.
Lotara loved the calm that took hold in moments like this. This was what she was best at, and all she ever needed was free rein to play the game her way. Outwardly, she was relaxed in her throne, but her eyes were everywhere at once – locator and vector hololithics; targeting array displays; the multisected oculus screen; and even her own officers, to make sure they were bearing up as expected.
They had two Gloriana-class flagships and whatever in the hells the Trisagion was supposed to be. There was no way Lotara Sarrin was going down without a fight, no matter how devastatingly, hopelessly outnumbered they were. In fact, she kept finding herself wanting to laugh.
The enemy armada came running close, each squadron falling into attack formation and holding with admirable unity. Every battleship and carrier was defended by destroyers and frigates, and each squadron was led by cruisers with their own lesser escorts.
‘Forty-one,’ Lehralla said, her voice distant the way it always was when she was seeing through the ship’s scanners rather than her own eyes. ‘Forty-one enemy vessels.’
Lotara heard Ivar Tobin’s quiet curse to the side of her throne. It was, she agreed, an insane force to face practically alone. What few escorts they’d kept with them would be nothing more than sacrificial lambs in the maw of the enemy fleet, but Angron and Lorgar had needed to spread their Legions behind enemy lines, and Captain Sarrin would work with what she had left. She hadn’t earned the Blood Hand for whining about the odds.
Even so, she estimated those odds were about even. The Trisagion could take twenty lesser vessels alone, and there were many, many reasons Gloriana-class battlecruisers were used as Legion flagships. Plenty of the Ultramarines armada already looked wounded, or cobbled together from separate fleets. It wasn’t a dedicated interdiction war-fleet, it was clearly a ragtag strike force: a lance thrust to the enemy’s heart. Someone – perhaps even Lord Guilliman himself – had done the best he could with limited resources.
If she had been leading that enemy fleet, she knew how she’d roll the dice in this fight. The Ultramarines victory counted on two factors. First, that the Conqueror, the Lex and the Trisagion would be torn apart by the massed firepower of smaller ships. The XIII Legion’s cruisers and battleships would run abeam for repeated exchanges of broadsides, offering targets too big and powerful to ignore, while the rest of the fleet used calculated lance strikes from safer range. She suspected the armada would divide its assault potential, doing its damndest to kill either the Lex or the Conqueror, and taking the other by boarding parties. The Trisagion was too vast and deadly to take with boarders or with a divided fleet, but nor would any sane void commander devote their entire focus to attacking it first. The two Legion flagships would be free to inflict unrivalled damage in the time it took to cripple the king-ship.
The second factor was planetfall. The Legiones Astartes excelled at fighting void wars and surface battles at once, and this attack run reeked of something personal. The Ultramarines were coming for revenge here, just as they were apparently pursuing Kor Phaeron all the way to the Maelstrom on the other side of Ultramar.
Several ships would make a run for Nuceria, haemorrhaging drop pods, landers and gunships, forcing planetfall by any means necessary. They’d have to come in close – close enough to brawl, just as Lotara liked it – but they’d get the job done, and Meahor would be crawling with the enemy in no time at all.
This was what she loved about void battles. Up here, in the coldness of space, you were trading death at unthinkable distances one minute, and manoeuvring city-sized warships close enough to scratch each other’s paintwork a minute later. It didn’t lack the adrenaline and frantic focus of a ground battle, it simply refined it into something much more civilised.
Void war was a thinker’s war.
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Lehralla’s cabled head turned again. ‘Captain, fourteen of the enemy vessels, those in the axial formation marked now on the hololith, bear transponders correlating to the Martian Mechanicum. Several appear to be Titan-carriers.’
Lotara resisted the urge to swear at length and in great detail. Whatever broke through their blockade – and plenty was going to make it through, no question there – would make life murder for those on the surface. Ultramarines were bad enough. Ultramarines and Titans was about the worst news she could receive.
‘Inform the primarchs and Legion captains they are likely to be dealing with Titans as well,’ she ordered Kejic. ‘Weaponmaster, time to maximum range?’
‘Enemy vanguard will reach maximum lance range in one minute, fifty seconds.’
‘Good, good. Feyd, status of our fighter squadrons?’
‘All flying free, ma’am.’ The young lieutenant didn’t look up from his scanner console. ‘Captain, I have an idea regarding phase two of the engagement.’
‘As long as it’s not about capital ship movement, I wait with bated breath. Let’s hear it.’
Rather then tell her, he showed her. The tactical suggestion played out on the hololithic display as Feyd ran a simulation over the course of ten seconds. By the end, the flag-captain was smiling.
‘Do it,’ she said. Her confidence in him wasn’t idle assumption; no one oversaw a spread of fighter squadrons quite like Feyd, which was why Lotara had poached him from the battleship Interregnum for her own command crew.
She waited, drumming her fingertips on the armrest of her throne. ‘Keep an open vox-link to the Lex and Trisagion.’
‘Aye, ma’am,’ Kejic replied.
‘Are they in position?’
‘Yes, captain,’ replied Lehralla.
Lotara looked up at Tobin, ever-loyal, ever by her throne. ‘Did you imagine you’d die in Ultramar, Ivar?’
‘I try not to imagine dying at all, ma’am. Weapons primed and awaiting your mark.’
‘Thank you, Ivar. I suspect they’ll choose to board the Conqueror and destroy the Lex, given the grudge they surely carry against Lord Aurelian’s Legion, but if it happens the other way around, I’ll just say now that it’s been a pleasure serving with you.’
‘I’m honoured you’d say so, ma’am.’
The command crew exchanged glances and smiles as they listened to their ranking officers.
‘Now then.’ Lotara cleared her throat. ‘Let’s start killing.’
TWENTY
Blood in the Void
Going to the Triarii
He Dies Here
It didn’t take long for her to lose all track of the surface war. The Ultramarines fleet swept over and against them like an insect horde, robbing any attention she’d have liked to let linger on how the Legion was doing. Her world erupted in a kaleidoscopic mess of weapon flashes, shield flares, and the insistent flicker of sirens. Every officer was reporting at once, while still shouting at their own underlings. The ship shook in a tempest’s grip, and the bridge smelled of unwashed skin, rancid breath, and the faint smoky spice of internal systems burning.
Lotara was a dervish, delivering a ceaseless stream of orders between tracking the constantly-updating hololithic projections. Her most pressing concern wasn’t that her ships were taking a beating, but that trying to stop the enemy getting past them was a game of fighting back an ocean tide with cupped hands and harsh language.
‘The Ceres,’ Lehralla called, twisting in her socket cradle. The legless girl had to shout over the shaking chamber. ‘The Ceres is running past us.’
Lotara gave three precious seconds to her personal hololithic display, beamed up from the microprojectors in her armrests. The Ceres, the Ceres… There. Bulk cruiser. A Dominus-class battle-barge. That meant troops, thousands of troops. Damn it, damn it, damn it.
The Ceres’s rune flickered past the sigil marking the Conqueror. There were still two Ultramarines warships between the World Eaters flagship and the ship it needed to stop, and seven others rolling above and below, in the middle of their own laborious strafing runs.
If Lotara came about, she’d abort her kill-run against the Unbroken Vigil and risk another full minute of broadsides from the… No, it didn’t matter. The Ceres had to die.
‘Come about,’ she called, ready to shoot the first officer to dare argue.
‘Come about!’ Tobin relayed the order in a roar.
The ship groaned beneath them, at the mercy of momentum, retros and protesting roll/pitch/yaw thrusters.
‘Everything on the Ceres,’ Lotara ordered. ‘Broadsides as we turn, then lances from the forward array at one-eighty degrees. Send that bitch to the ground in flames.’
‘The Legendary Son and the Glory of Fire are–’
‘I see them,’ she interrupted Feyd. ‘I’m not letting them get in our way. Engines to full burn.’
‘That will alter our turning arc to–’
‘I know where our arc will take us. I want the engines screaming. Cease starboard broadsides for immediate reload, I want them ready as we come about. We’ll only have one try at the Ceres.’
The Conqueror lumbered around, dragging itself away from the encircling Ultramarines ships, sacrificing a kill-run Lotara had spent the best part of five furious minutes setting up while under intense enemy fire. She watched the Unbroken Vigil roll aside, safe and unharmed, when she should be tumbling away in flaming pieces.
‘Ceres is manoeuvring for orbital release,’ called Lehralla, her watery doe-eyes wide at the hololithic, and her brittle teeth bared in the face of the fight.
The stars rolled across the oculus as the Conqueror turned, turned, turned, slow, slow, slow. The deck, her deck, was shaking beneath Lotara’s boots. They were taking one nightmare of a beating.
The Ceres hove into view, already kissing the atmosphere.
‘Laser batteries rea–’
‘Broadsides!’ Lotara yelled.
The Conqueror answered its captain, its cannons booming into the night’s silence. The deck heaved again, but it was a much more pleasant shudder this time. Space around the Ceres flared with luminescence as its shields resisted the torrent bursting against the ship’s hull. After three beautiful seconds of defensive pyrotechnics, the cruiser’s void shields shattered with enough force to send ripples of lightning across the ship’s armoured skin. The Conqueror hadn’t just broken through its prey’s defences – it had overloaded them through power strain. A cheer went up across the strategium at the sight.
‘Her shields are fouled.’ Lotara was almost laughing in a heady, nasty mix of relief and predatory pleasure. ‘Kill her.’
The Conqueror fired again, another broadside volley, then brought its forward weapons to bear as it finished coming about. The Ceres broke apart in high orbit, the barest touch of Nuceria’s atmosphere giving enough air for its wreckage to burn. Lotara gave it another few seconds, just to drink in the image: tens of thousands of lives ending in fire.
‘Status of the Trisagion?’ she called, turning back to the bridge.
‘Fighting like nothing I’ve ever seen before,’ Tobin replied, more than a little awed at the figures spilling down his data-feed monitor. ‘We’d have lasted less than three minutes without her. She might even win this once we’re gone.’
‘What are the odds of that?’
‘Terrible, ma’am. But there’s still a chance.’
‘And the Lex?’
At that, Tobin shook his head. ‘The Lex is dying.’
The Fidelitas Lex punched through the wreck of a smaller cruiser, ramming it aside. The Word Bearers flagship was already a ruin, its armour pitted and cracked, its shields a memory. The cathedrals and spinal fortresses barnacling along its back were gone, laid waste by the Ultramarines’ incendiary rage.
The XIII Legion armada attacked in straf
ing runs and protracted exchanges of broadsides, trading fire with the superior ship and accepting their own casualties as the cost of bleeding the bigger vessel dry. Each assault left the Lex weaker, firing fewer turrets and cannons, taking punishment on increasingly fragile armour. Air and water was vented in silent gushes from holes in the hull, while fuel and coolant flooded from similar wounds. Crew – many of whom were praying as they died – were sucked from the hundreds of other hull ruptures. Lotara took this all in with a glance; it looked like the Lex was being turned inside-out, its innards aflame and pulled out into the void.
But she still fought. Crawling with smaller ships, the Lex lashed back with its remaining cannons, rolling in the light of its own burning hull.
The Ultramarines commander, whoever guided the battle from the command deck of Courage Above All, had made their choice. The Conqueror would be boarded, killed from within. The Lex would die first, killed in the death of a thousand cuts and swept from the game board.
The Conqueror couldn’t rise in its sister-ship’s defence. Both flagships fought alone, starved of support and suffering the endless attacks of the XIII Legion’s ragged armada.
‘A bad end for a fine lady,’ Lotara commented, ‘even if she is full of fanatics.’
Salvation pods were streaming from the Lex’s sides and underbelly, along with heavier Mechanicum craft and bulk landers. With the legionaries already on the surface, the ship’s human population was fleeing in the vessel’s final minutes. And still she fought – rolling, turning, raging. The Ultramarines cruisers drifting past burned as badly as the warship they were killing. Dirty fighting, too close for calculations, up close and personal. Lotara felt guilty for loving every second.
‘She’s still with us,’ Tobin noted.
‘Not for long. Can we break free to support her?’
Tobin’s dry laugh was answer enough.
Lotara was staring hard at her personal hololith. ‘You’re no fun, Ivar.’
Eshramar had one duty, and it was proving the hardest one of his life. And unless it got easier, it would also be the last duty of his life. One he’d fail, as it happened.
Betrayer Page 32
