Salvation's Reach

by Dan Abnett

  But he could tell that a fight was going on. The deck creaked and the superstructure groaned, under tension. Every minute or so, the lights would dip and come back, or the engines would begin another frantic round of thrashing output. Static coated every surface; he presumed that was a side effect of the void shields. He’d seen it in buildings and ground vehicles close to active Titans.

  Most of all he could feel the fight inside him, in his gut, his inner ear, his kinaesthetic sense. He could sense the soundless, invisible pull and twist and wrench of inertial compensation. The gravitic systems were fighting to maintain the environmental status quo as the ship lurched and came about. He felt as if he was standing in a quiet, swaying building: it flooded him with memories. Being in a high tower on Balhaut during the first firestorms. Being on the curtain walls of Vervunhive as the Heritor’s woe-machines lumbered in.

  At least, he reflected, he hoped it was the gravitic stresses. He hoped it was not the turbulence of his restless soul, troubled by a distress it had never expected.

  The hatchway to a grand chamber lay open. Inside, under gently swinging lamp rigs, the Iron Snake Holofurnace was performing a fast sword drill against hololithic targets.

  The sword work was devastatingly swift. Holofurnace was using a cross-stroke and rotational style Gaunt had not seen before, switching from one hand to a two-handed grip depending on the attitude of the sword.

  Helmet off, Eadwine was sitting to one side, watching the rehearsal.

  He didn’t look up as Gaunt approached, but he knew the human was there.

  ‘I thought you’d be cowering somewhere,’ said Eadwine, his voice a machine rasp.

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ replied Gaunt.

  ‘No,’ Eadwine admitted. He kept watching the Iron Snake’s sword drill. The Iron Snake hadn’t even acknowledged Gaunt’s presence.

  ‘He is getting sloppy,’ said the Silver Guard warrior. ‘I don’t know what kind of blade-work they teach on Ithaka these days.’

  ‘Aren’t you concerned about the battle?’ asked Gaunt. ‘I thought you might have gone to the bridge.’

  Eadwine turned to look at him.

  ‘What would that achieve? There’s no part for us to play. Not unless they board us. Are they likely to board us?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  The Silver Guard shrugged.

  ‘Then all we can do is bide our time until we are faced with our kind of fight.’

  ‘You don’t need to know what’s going on?’ asked Gaunt.

  Holofurnace stopped slicing his sword and glanced over.

  ‘Only if we live,’ he said. ‘If we die, why care about the detail?’

  He went back about his training. The sword flashed fast, spinning and interweaving.

  Gaunt realised that Eadwine was still staring at him.

  ‘I do not read your face well,’ said Eadwine. ‘I do not read human micro expressions. They are too weak, insignificant.’

  Gaunt didn’t know how to reply.

  ‘But you seem concerned,’ the Silver Guard went on. ‘Clearly, there is the stress factor of this fight, but you are a man who has known battles. Where is your resolution? There is, it seems to me, another element troubling you.’

  ‘You read our faces well enough,’ said Gaunt.

  Eadwine frowned and nodded, as if quietly please with his achievement.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I find myself distracted,’ said Gaunt. ‘Without expecting to, I find myself concerned for the welfare of another person aboard. That concern has surprised me to an extent I find dismaying.’

  ‘You question your focus.’

  ‘I worry about maintaining it.’

  ‘Is it a woman?’ asked Eadwine. ‘A woman? A sexual partner? I understand that can be very distracting for the emotionally compromised.’

  ‘No,’ said Gaunt. ‘I have recently learned that I have a son.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Eadwine. ‘Offspring. I know nothing about them either.’

  He tilted his head, listening.

  ‘You hear?’ he asked.

  Holofurnace had stopped drilling to listen too. Gaunt concentrated. He could make out a distant, repetitive thumping, masked by the engine throb, the steady chug of a machine rotating or cycling.

  ‘That’s the ship’s primary magazine delivering munitions at the fastest possible continuous pace,’ said Eadwine. ‘We are unloading everything we have at a sustained rate. We are trying to kill something very big.’

  TWELVE

  Kill Recorded

  Whatever sentience controlled the daemon ship Ominator, its gleeful hunger for murder was so intense that it only belatedly became aware of the way the Armaduke and the Libertus had squeezed it into an untenable position.

  They had met its headlong rush at the Imperial position with calm resolve, intercepting its trajectory so that the Ominator was obliged to pass between them. Such was the Ominator’s fever to engage, it was over pacing itself. It became apparent that it was not going to be able to break off or execute an evasion in time, certainly not without rendering itself more vulnerable. Any attempt to hard turn out of the tactical lock would have consumed vast amounts of its power reserve and de-positioned it hopelessly in the battlesphere alignment.

  It continued to shriek its name. The shielding around its prow and flanks began to throb with a sub-photonic gleam the colour of burst entrails. Mechanical organs along its spine and between the blades of its ribs began to throb as it gathered power for a main weapon strike.

  Advancing steadily, the Armaduke and the Libertus exchanged a brief non-verbal signal and began to hose fire at the enemy ship. Two streams of bombardment ripped out from the Imperial pair, converging like the lines of some infernal diagram on the Ominator. The streams were traceries of pulsed and beamed energy weapons, the unified output of hundreds of batteries slaved to the master tracking cogitators. Heavy ordnance systems spat torrents of hard shell munitions, missiles, ship-to-ship ballistic charges and bombard rockets.

  The Ominator soaked it up without breaking stride, taking the titanic barrage from the Libertus against its forward port shields and the destructive abuse of the slightly extended Armaduke across its starboard side and belly.

  The two ships maintained their relentless assault. The Ominator advanced in the face of their sustained fury, apparently oblivious, as if the onslaught was entirely futile. The fire rate was stupendous. Two gunners aboard the Libertus were killed by recoil trying to service the hard batteries fast enough, and an artificer aboard the Armaduke was burned to death by an overheating laser assembly. From his command seat aboard the Armaduke, Spika believed he had never seen a ship take such relentless punishment.

  The Ominator squealed its name and attempted to fire, but the hellish lightning failed to develop enough to whip out from the hull. It tried again, and then again: two or three more stuttering attempts at ignition.

  Then its shields failed, and its hull tore open like a punctured membrane. Shielding energies billowed out into the void around it like ink in water, like ragged sailcloth carried along by a storm-borne ship, like a ruptured egg sac.

  Something catastrophic happened deep inside the daemon ship’s hull. There was a considerable though muffled explosion deep inside the ship about two-thirds of the way down its length. It was not a huge, satisfying sunburst of annihilation, but it blew out areas of deck plate and internal structure. Clouds of burning, toxic energy and atmosphere belched out. The mainframe shuddered.

  Then the Ominator went dead. All of its onboard light sources died, even the infernal red glow from its core. Its energy output signature ceased, apart from the shreds of radiation and flame coming from the damaged sections. Its drive failed. Its plant failed. Its reactors failed. It became, in a second or two, an inert, dead lump of black machine junk, scorched and holed. Carried by its own forwards momentum, it began to tumble, prow tipping up, drive section rotating under, debris littering out of it like a spiral vapour trail.

&n
bsp; The Imperial ships ceased fire. They waited, poised, in case it was a ruse, in case the daemon ship had decided to turn itself into a weapon and ram one of them.

  It was lifeless. Blundering on, spinning like a discarded piece of scrap, it passed between them leaving a trickle of ejecta dispersing in its wake.

  ‘Kill recorded,’ cried out the Master of Detection.

  ‘For the Emperor,’ growled Spika.

  As the Armaduke and the Libertus shared their kill, the vast Sepiterna had turned its guns against the Necrostar Antiversal. The enemy ship had crossed the main Imperial gunline, soaking up fire from the escorts as it paced a long, fast burn of an attack run across the battleship’s bows, a diagonal slash across the alignment of the battlesphere.

  Gorehead, a raging little beast, had fired in support of its keening brethren, trying to stifle the gunline’s output and disrupt any aim at the Necrostar. A cloud of small craft had formed forward of the Imperial line, a massive dogfight swirl like pollen spilling from a flower head. Fury flights, along with heavier support squadrons loosed by the Imperial ships, had ripped into the formations of Archenemy killships. One especially sustained duel was being fought to keep the daemon interceptors away from the Aquila bearing the lord militant.

  Gorehead’s primary weapons scored a decent hit against an Imperial destroyer called Phalanxor, enough to impair its void shields, and rendered it ineffective for long enough to allow Necrostar Antiversal its passage. Necrostar Antiversal was spitting massive hullcutter missiles at the Imperial flagship, and its primary energy batteries were cycling up to strike.

  Sepiterna, an almost stationary island more than ten kilometres long, reached out to deny the obdurate intruder. Beam weapons, red sparks in the brown twilight of the void, found and neutralised the running missiles, igniting quick bright flashes of white fire. Then the principal weapon fired, and slapped the charging Archenemy vessel sideways. Necrostar Antiversal spun away, all stability control lost. Its port bow section glowed with a fierce internal blaze, and atomised structural debris squirted from its lurching bulk. It stopped screaming its name and instead simply screamed. Demented with damage and pain, the Necrostar Antiversal fell away, righted itself, and then began to flee. The flight may have been caused by a drive malfunction or a loss of helm. It was frantic and headlong. The Necrostar’s realspace engines went to full burn, one of them clearly misfiring and crippled to such an extent the ship was leaving a dirty trail of burning fuel and radioactive blowback behind it. It veered away like a comet, and streaked towards the distant limits of the system like a scolded hound, beaten and driven away yelping.

  Shipmaster Spika was aware that his artificers were desperate to lower shields. Sustaining them at maximum was depleting the reserves at a nightmarish rate. With fifty per cent of the enemy strength dismissed, surely the fight was done. Any grasp of tactical logic could tell you that.

  Spika knew from bitter experience that when it came to void fighting with the Ruinous Powers, tactical logic had little or no place. He had, for many years as a more junior officer, studied the behavioural habits of large carnivores, particularly in such circumstances as hunting, protecting a kill or defending their family group or their young, as well as their actions when wounded or cornered. That, he had found, was most often how Archenemy ships performed. They did not make calculated strategic moves as though the battlesphere was a giant, three-dimensional regicide board. They did not observe the traditions and crafts of Battlefleet tactics as learned and studied by the officers of the Imperial Navy.

  They fought like animals in traps, like wounded rogue beasts cornered in a canyon, like predators in the forest gloom. They ignored logic, or technical comparatives, or the output of threat assessment cogitators.

  That, in the considered opinion of Clemensew Spika, an opinion not shared by the Departmento Tacticae of the Imperial Fleet, an opinion that had probably hindered the progress of his career over the years, that was why the Archenemy often won.

  Tormaggedon Monstrum Rex, the behemoth capital ship of the enemy force, turned towards them. It had lost its appetite for a direct fight with the mighty Sepiterna and its resolved gunline, but it was evidently quite prepared to make a parthian shot or two at the Armaduke and the Libertus, pushed forwards and vulnerable as they were.

  Spika ordered a hard evasive turn back towards the sun, and watched on the strategium display to see that Libertus was doing the same. If they could at least place themselves decently in the optimum reach of the main gunline, it might be enough to dissuade the monster from harrying them.

  But the Rex was fast. It was the single biggest vessel involved in the fleet action; not as stately and deep through the waist as the majestic Sepiterna, but longer and of significantly greater tonnage. It accelerated, however, like a frigate. A light frigate. It was quite the nimblest supermassive Spika had seen since the Palodron Campaign against the diseased craftworld. Its internal glow, coal red, flared as if bellows had been applied. It powered in, weapon banks developing charge for a shot.

  The Sepiterna spurred its whole gunline forwards, but it was a gesture that would have little practical effect in the timeframe. The Aggressor Libertus, a significant ship in its own right, began firing as it turned, loosing as much as it could at the oncoming monster. The daemon ship’s shields held firm. The Libertus’s barrage, enough to strip a hive down to the mantle, spattered off the voidshields like firecrackers.

  The Rex fired. The energy whiplash, so bright it was not any sort of colour at all, struck the Libertus in the small of the back, popped its shields like a soap bubble, shattered the hull jacket, and cored a hole down through the decks like someone cracking through decorative icing to slice open a layer cake. It was not one blast, one flash. The jerking, kinking coil of energy linked the two ships together like an electrical arc for almost twenty seconds. Its point of impact was brighter than a spot-welding torch. The burning force sheared through the Libertus, cutting it in a line that ran along its spine towards its prow. The cruiser was almost bisected lengthways. When the awful weapon finally shut off, the Libertus broke up, not cleanly in half like a nutshell, but into two large sections along a surgically straight line. Almost a third of the cruiser’s tonnage sheared away along the port side from central environmental to the prow, armour splintering like glass, internal contents, crew and debris voiding in a cloud like smoke. The sectioning was so precise that Spika could see the cross-cut through the decks through his viewer, like a cross-section display in one of the glass cases at the Admiralty. He saw fires burning inside, pressure compartments blowing, bulkheads shredding, atmosphere venting, hydraulics and other fluids billowing out in quicksilver blobs. He saw slicks of debris litter and realised they were masses of weightless corpses.

  A secondary blast blew out the Libertus’s ruptured plasma drives, sending the larger of the two hull portions spinning nose over tail out of a bright yellow explosion. The spinning section clipped the other hull portion and sent it tumbling out to one side, regurgitating material into the void.

  The Rex brushed past its kill and closed on the Armaduke, dwarfing it. It was set to send the Imperial battlegroup home with at least three dead.

  Its main weapons gathered charge, cracking fury in the reservoirs beneath the skin of the hull. It closed tighter still, perhaps intending to riddle the Armaduke to scrap with its small batteries rather than waste the main charge.

  Spika felt its shadow on them. It overhauled them, blotting out the sun, a leviathan ten or twelve times their size. Every sensor on the Armaduke’s bridge screamed. Every alarm sounded. Spika instructed his gun crews to unload everything they had.

  Tormaggedon Monstrum Rex boomed its name into the darkness. But it did not stop.

  It passed so close by the Armaduke, the frigate shivered hard in its wake, and it kept accelerating, driving out along the unvariable and away, developing speed and translating into the warp. Gorehead, yapping at its heels, followed.

  By then, the Necrostar
Antiversal had fled through the outsystem and away, wailing in blind pain, and the corpse of the Ominator was tumbling down into the fires of Tavis Sun.

  THIRTEEN

  Turn Around

  Dorden took a deep breath. Tension and fatigue had put a tiny tic in the corner of his right eye and a tremble in his liver-spotted hands. Rawne was struck by how grey the old doctor’s skin had become. It reminded him, painfully, of the skin paint used by the sleepwalkers of the Gereon Untill, and of the wood-ash dust that the old nalwoodland communities of Tanith had used to anoint bodies for funerary rites. He’d never made that connection before. He made a point of not thinking about Tanith unless he had to.

  ‘He’ll live,’ said Dorden.

  Rawne nodded. He looked down at Cant. The trooper was unconscious, in a chemically-induced coma, his neck wrapped in bindings and counterseptic wadding. His face was drained of blood, colourless white rather than Dorden’s dead grey. Dorden and the new man, Kolding, had worked for two intensive hours to save Cant’s life. No one could yet tell what brain damage might accompany the catastrophic blood loss of the throat wound.

  Rawne patted Dorden’s arm.

  ‘There’s nothing I could do for the others,’ Dorden said.

  Rawne didn’t turn to look at the wrapped corpses of Kabry and MkTally. Two Kings dead, another severely wounded. They had paid a high cost already guarding the pheguth etogaur. And that was without counting Edur and the crew personnel, and the poor bandsman fool that the Sirkle must have slain on Menazoid Sigma in order to worm his way into their midst.

  ‘Get some rest,’ said Rawne.

  Dorden laughed. The infirmary was busy. In the aftermath of the void fight and the commotion aboard, there had been a lot of minor injuries: a few concussions and broken bones. There was still work to be done.