Falka’s grimace became a snarl as he pounded at the holding spar with impotent rage. ‘Hold on,’ he growled, moving towards the engine. ‘We’re about to breach the surface.’
The rail-lifter cleared the slowly closing shaft doors and after a few more metres broke into the pale Damnosian sun. Another miner called Fuge kicked open the exit ramp and the sixty or so survivors pounded it across to the arctic tundra of the upper world.
Though the sun was shining, an icy wind brought a chill and kicked up slurries of snow and frost eddies. The barren wastes of Damnos had never looked so bleak.
There was no need for conversation. What could any of them say, anyway? So the sixty survivors made for the distant comms-bunker, marching in file, heads bowed against the wind and ice. Behind them the shutting of the shaft door was like a death knell for the hundreds still trapped within.
850.973.M41
There was still no word from Damnos Prime, and the Valkyrie gunships Lieutenant Sonne had deployed from Secundus to investigate were also quiet. It didn’t take a soldier’s instincts to realise that something was wrong.
‘We’re experiencing a full communications black-out in the northern regions all the way to the Tyrrean Ocean, colonel,’ he gave his report to Quintus Tarn. The commander of the Damnosian Ark Guard peered over steepled fingers into the shadows of his operations chamber. His mood was pensive. Leaning on the desk with his elbows, he hadn’t stirred the entire time Adanar Sonne had been in his presence.
Behind the colonel a planetary map showed the location of each and every manufactorum, drilling-station, mining complex, refinery, labour-clave and outpost on Damnos. Unlit lume-globes represented the stations that Kellenport, the planetary capital, had lost touch with. Precious few of the globes were lit.
The wave of darkness emanating from the north reminded Adanar of a slowly creeping shroud. ‘We picked up a group of refugee mine workers from one of the outposts near Damnos Prime,’ he offered.
Tarn looked up at Adanar for the first time since he’d entered the room.
‘How many?’
‘Thirteen, sir.’
‘Are they saying anything?’
‘I don’t know yet, colonel. They were picked up by a patrol. Apparently, they’d been trekking across the tundra for several weeks. Administrator Rancourt is amongst the survivors,’ Adanar added.
‘Inform the lord governor and bring them all to me as soon as they arrive at Kellenport.’
‘Yes, sir. Is there anything else?’
‘Do you have a wife and child, Lieutenant Sonne?’ asked Tarn. The colonel was staring right into his eyes.
‘Er, yes… Yes, I do.’
Though Tarn smiled, his eyes were despairing black gulfs.
As if seeing them for the first time, Adanar noticed the stubs of tabac in a silver tray to the commander’s left; on the right was a vox-unit. Its message received light was flashing silently.
‘Is something wrong, sir?’
‘Listen,’ Tarn answered simply.
He broke the steeple of his fingers and replayed the vox-message blinking insistently on the unit. The opening segment was fraught with static, natural interference on account of the distance and the weather conditions. Slowly, a voice resolved through the auditory crackle.
‘…found something, sir…’
Adanar recognised the hard timbre of Major Tarken. He didn’t know the man personally but his reputation preceded him as one of the most lauded combat veterans amongst the Ark Guard.
Colonel Tarn tapped a rune on the vox-unit and a grainy hololith issued from a projector-node. It took a few seconds to synch to the audio. Major Tarken appeared in jagged resolution.
‘Image-servitors accompanied the platoon,’ the colonel explained unnecessarily.
Major Tarken was speaking to the picter. ‘The manufactorums at Damnos Prime were silent, but there is definitely something here.’
The view swung downwards at the major’s request, revealing several skeletal remains.
‘Could be labour serfs or rig-hands…’
Adanar caught Tarn’s hooded gaze. ‘Was this a live feed?’
‘Up until about twenty minutes ago.’
The picter swung up again. Panning left and right, it showed Tarken’s men advancing in echelon formation. The sound kept cutting out, succumbing to crackling interference or the occasional hiss of static, but it seemed quiet. Mist from the cold exuded off the walls in a fine veil. Tarken’s kit and that of his men was wet with the moisture, and crusted from it flash-freezing.
‘…moving into the main drilling area now…’ Tarken was whispering and brought up his lasgun. Somebody shouted from up ahead, a scout off-picter.
‘Where was this?’ asked Adanar, utterly enrapt on the hololith.
‘Dagoth Station, three hundred kilometres north of Secundus at Halaheim.’
A flash on the pict was too bright to be static. Someone had started firing.
‘Contacts! Contacts!’ Tarken was running and the whir of the servitor’s tracked impellers could be heard as it shifted gear to keep pace with the major. Though largely stable, the additional momentum made the image blur and haze. The whine of lasguns was getting louder over the audio, too.
Adanar leaned in closer. Tarken had reached his frontline and was taking up a position behind some riggers evidently in for repair. Around thirty men adopted similar postures and hunkered down. Farther ahead, men were shouting. The scouts were discharging weapons and Tarken was trying to raise their sergeant on the vox.
Something garbled came over the vox-return, twice filtered for Adanar’s ears and totally indiscernible.
The picter was still shaking, although the servitor had stopped behind the major.
‘Can we steady it?’
Tarn didn’t answer. He was fixated on the hololith.
Something was appearing through the mist. An emerald glow coloured the fog suddenly, as if tainting it. Shots from the scouts ended with its arrival.
‘Holy Throne…’ Tarken was levelling his lasgun over the makeshift barricade. A beam snapped out of the dark, ugly and green, and one of the riggers was shorn in two. ‘Holy fegging Throne! All weapons, bring them down!’
The chamber lit up with over thirty las-bursts. Tarken’s troopers went to full automatic, draining their power packs with an abandon and urgency Adanar had never seen before in professional soldiers.
The things coming out of the fog, they were… nightmares. It was the only word Adanar could think of to describe them. Huge, broad-shouldered skeletoids with strange, glowing carbines attached to their arms. Energy coursed up and down the wide tubular barrels and was expelled in bright lances of dirty emerald.
They moved like automatons, neither speaking nor slowing as a barrage of las-bolts hammered them.
‘Increase fire!’
The picter zoomed in, blurring the image at first but then focussing in on one of the metal skeletons. Its eyes blazed with a terrible fire, suggesting a crude sentience that chilled the lieutenant’s blood even removed, as he was, from the firefight and the moment.
Adanar saw the creature jerk spasmodically as it was struck by countless las-shots. It must have taken over ten well-placed bolts to down it. Chunks of metal flew off its carapace body, fused rib-plate and punctured presumably vital systems before it fell.
The picter lingered. Horrified, Adanar watched the broken components slowly reknit as las-fire raged around the creature’s prone form. Wires snaked across the ground finding other wires and, like sewn flesh, drew the shattered pieces together. Metal became as mercury, dissolving into liquid before being drawn to the torso as if magnetised. Impossibly, the skeleton rose intact and fired its terrible beam weaponry again.
‘…all back… Fall back!’
Tarken stood up to order the retreat. The vox-man next to him was spun by a glancing hit from one of the beams. Half of his face and right shoulder were missing, simply stripped down to glistening bone.
It was more rout than retreat.
Major Tarken took a hit to the chest. His carapace armour dissolved on contact, so too his uniform and under-mesh, his skin and flesh and bone. A hole opened up in his back, what remained of blood and innards cauterised before Tarken crumpled in a dead heap.
The image-servitor was the last to fall. Unarmed, Adanar assumed it presented the lowest level of threat to the creatures.
Just before the report ended a looming skeletal face filled the screen. Bale-fires smouldered in its eye sockets and spoke of unfathomable hatred.
A squeal of binaric or something like it keened through the speaker. Adanar winced and recoiled. When he’d opened his eyes a split second later, the screen was dead, frozen on the skeleton’s face.
The lieutenant was sweating, his heart racing in his chest. He licked his lips. They were dry and his voice croaked at first, ‘What are those…?’ He coughed, clearing his throat and tried again. ‘What are they, colonel?’
A figure emerging out of the darkness behind Tarn had Adanar reaching for his laspistol. He only relaxed when he recognised Magos Karnak.
The tech-priest’s timbre was as cold and unforgiving as Adanar imagined the skeletons to be. ‘Ancient and terrible, and they are here, lieutenant.’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
Tarn interjected, switching off the hololith and stopping the dead-air audio feed. ‘It means they have come for us, for this world.’
Adanar bit back his anger – he was only reacting to his irrational fear. ‘With respect, sir, that explains shit-all. What’s going on?’
‘The lord governor has been informed,’ said Tarn, ‘and is being secured in a Proteus-class command bunker with his generals as we speak. He intends to conduct operations from there.’
‘Very wise, sir, but what precisely are we dealing with here?’
‘The Nobilis has been contacted and is adopting geo-stationary orbit above the capital.’
Tarn was talking as if he’d lost it. Adanar wanted to shake him. ‘Sir!’
‘They are coming to Kellenport, Sonne. I sent over fifty thousand men to Damnos Prime and Secundus, and all the stations in-between. All of them, our fleet at anchor in the Tyrrean – dead, all of them.’
Adanar nearly choked. ‘What?’
Karnak advanced into Adanar’s eye-line, the whirr of his tracks drawing a scowl from the lieutenant.
‘That scrambled piece of binaric was a data-burst,’ the magos explained. ‘There was a message encoded within it. Based on a proto-Gothic linguistic system, it was easy to discern the meaning. My xeno-linguistic savants took approximately thirteen point two-six minutes to decipher it.’
‘Are you looking for praise, magos?’
‘No, I am merely suggesting that the simple encoding was deliberate. They wanted us to hear it.’
‘Hear what?’ asked Adanar.
Colonel Tarn activated a different message spool on the vox-unit. After a few seconds of charged silence an unearthly voice issued from the speakers. It resonated with age and archaic menace, as if drawn from the grave or the depths of a planet-eating black hole.
We are the necrontyr. We are legion. We claim dominion of this world… Surrender and die.
‘Throne of Earth,’ Adanar could only rasp. He found his composure again after a few more seconds. ‘Surely, it means surrender or die?’
Karnak uttered a sombre reply. ‘No, Lieutenant Sonne, the translation is accurate.’
‘In the Emperor’s name, what are these things?’
‘Death, lieutenant – they are death. Adanar,’ said the colonel, getting to his feet at last. ‘Take your family and get out of Kellenport. Go south. Do it quickly, before it’s too late.’
020.974.M41
Aboard the Nobilis
The bridge was frantic with activity.
Captain Unser barked orders at his command crew from a gilded throne inlaid with operation-gems and picter-slates. ‘Get me firing solutions on those war cells, now!’
Naval ratings scattered as Unser’s flag-lieutenant cracked the whip of his tongue in relaying the captain’s commands. Far below the sub-command dais, servitors slaved to control-pits worked tirelessly to manoeuvre the ship, responding to the dictates of their helmsman; others processed and relayed back firing information, making minor weapons adjustments that would be fed down to the gun-decks.
‘Melta torpedoes at forty-four per cent, my lord,’ said the flag-lieutenant, Ikaran.
Unser’s eyes flashed in the sepulchral gloom of the bridge. The long scar he’d earned whilst posted in support of the Plovian VI Imperial Guard looked like a vertical grin on the left side of his face. ‘Give ’em another dose, sir.’
Ikaran relayed the orders and the message bled down through the ship to the gun-decks.
Unser smiled, his mouth pulling at the injuries that chronicled a life that had only ever known war.
He loved this. He absolutely… Loved. It.
The Nobilis was invincible. A capital ship, the largest in the line, Dominator-class – it was an expression of Unser’s undeniable will and righteous anger. Dread enemies had come to Damnos, unearthed from the very bowels of the world. Though he had not seen them up close, Unser was determined to send them back to whence they came, turning them into the corpses they already resembled.
‘Torpedoes away, lord,’ said Ikaran.
‘Bring it up.’
The bridge picters delineating the forward arc of the command dais came online. They showed a view of realspace and the half hemisphere of southern Damnos. Bright, blazing contrails invaded the vista as the torpedo payload sped earthwards.
Unser leant forwards, revelling in the power. ‘And in three… two… one–’
A series of bright blooms lit the world’s surface from the massive impacts. The Nobilis was at the cusp of the mesosphere and close enough to see the effect of the incendiaries on the ground.
Ikaran had his hand to his ear, a comms-officer on board ship reporting back to him.
‘Hits on eighty per cent of targets, lord.’
Unser allowed himself to sit back. He gripped the arms of his command throne like a triumphant king. ‘Another barrage, if you please.’
The air was hot and sweaty on the gun-decks. Thousands of crew and hauler-servitors scurried in packs as the order came down from the bridge.
Overseer Caenen applied the lash to increase their efforts.
‘Sweat and blood, dogs,’ he drawled, bawling above the heavy drone of the engines and loading machinery. His hellish gaze followed the ammo hoppers, hoisted by teams of swarthy, soot-stained men, and glowered. ‘The cap’n wants another, we give him another!’ The lash cracked out again and the crews of torpedo tubes five through ten picked up the pace. All down the port-ventral aisle of the Nobilis’s gun-deck, the scene was the same. Overseers urged their crews with threats and cajoling, just like any good Navy men.
In less than three minutes the next barrage of torpedoes was prepared, the tubes locked, their deadly cargo primed for launch.
A wave of green ‘ready’ runes flickered down the hot darkness of the gun-deck. Vox communication went to the gunners who angled the tubes mechanically from their firing nests according to solutions provided by the bridge. All was in harmony, the perfect machine with the men of its crew its blood and sinew.
Caenen leapt down from his pulpit, stepping on a servitor’s bent back so he didn’t have to use the stairs. He grunted when his boots met the deck in a heavy thunk, berating a man for getting in his way and punching out another as he moved to a viewport.
The tiny aperture afforded a limited view of realspace, but enough to witness a torpedo barrage. Tearing open the iron hatch, Caenen wiped the grime and warp-frost from the many-layered plascrete protecting them all from the void and simply looked.
To the overseer, a bombardment was a thing of beauty. Even the many slummer-whores he had bedded, in spite of his scars and his lack of hygiene, paled. She, the N
obilis, was his true mistress… and the bitch had quite a slap in her.
When the launch tubes failed to vent, Caenen frowned. He wiped at his heavy breath where it had fogged the viewport, but he hadn’t missed it. The tubes were still full. He was about to start shouting and bawling again, ready to apply his boot to the fegger who’d screwed him, when a dense, ultra-concentrated beam speared from the surface.
‘What the shi–’
We are invulnerable.
The thought was a comfortable one and Captain Unser was enjoying this feeling of pre-eminence when the weapons failure rune on his command-slate spoiled it.
‘Mister Ikaran, report!’
The flag-lieutenant had his hand to his ear again, getting information from the comms-officer. ‘A jam, lord. We’ll have to repack and acquire new firing–’
The massive energy spike raging across all of the pict-screens on the bridge arrested Ikaran’s recommendations.
‘Lord, our shields will be–’
‘Impossible,’ breathed Unser, sitting up so he might defy his imminent death more staunchly. ‘They don’t have… Up here… we’re invinc–’
A bright flare of emerald light filled the bridge, blinding the crew and scorching their flesh despite the plascrete shielding on the viewports. The Nobilis’s shields capitulated in seconds, one after the other, and the once mighty vessel’s armour was sheared away like parchment by the necron beam. It impaled the bridge and lanced the heart of the ship. Plasma drives erupted in conflagration, sending roiling firestorms across all decks. Munitions and artillery cooked off in the blast, killing thousands. The main breach caused by the beam’s hungry trajectory resulted in several more sub-breaches – crewmen, equipment, entire bulkheads and sub-decks were vented into the void, flash-frozen.
In the gun-decks, Overseer Caenen didn’t even have enough time to curse before the torpedo wall was ripped away and the entire gunnery crew, all two thousand, three hundred and fifty souls, burned to death before being expelled into the cold night of space.
Lord Governor Arxis had not always been in the business of politicking. Unfortunately, it was a necessary evil when running a world of the Imperium. Such a task required a strong hand and a firm belief in the Emperor. Deviation from the Creed could not be tolerated; the people lived to serve His greater glory and the glory of mankind.
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